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Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab just shipped its first model, and led with the line “this is not the strongest model available.” Here’s what Inkling actually is, and why that admission is the interesting part.
Mira Murati spent six years as OpenAI’s CTO, and for one strange weekend in November 2023 she was its interim CEO, appointed by the board the night it fired Sam Altman, then present in the room five days later when the board reinstated him instead. She left the company in September 2024, raised roughly $2 billion in seed funding for a new startup called Thinking Machines Lab, and reportedly hit a $12 billion valuation before shipping a single product.
On July 15, 2026, seventeen months after founding the company, Thinking Machines released that first product: an open-weights model called Inkling. Buried in the announcement is a sentence that would get cut from most product launches: “Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed.” A company with $12 billion riding on it just told the market its flagship isn’t the best one on the shelf. That’s either refreshingly honest or a strange thing to lead with, and understanding which one it is means actually looking at what Inkling does instead of how it ranks.