Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first proprietary AI model Wednesday morning, called Inkling, an open-weight system designed for enterprise customization. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 975 billion total parameters but activates only about 41 billion per task, and is trained on 45 trillion tokens spanning text, image, audio, and video. Inkling includes features such as calibrated responses and a user-adjustable ‘thinking effort’ dial. On one internal benchmark, the company claims Inkling uses a third as many tokens as Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra to achieve the same coding performance, though the company explicitly states that Inkling is ‘not the strongest model available today, closed or open.’ The company’s Tinker platform allows organizations to fine-tune the model. A blog post by Thinking Machines argued that expertise specific to individual organizations is lost when AI is trained centrally. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that enterprises using proprietary AI models effectively pay twice, and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue predicted most production AI work will shift to private or open-source alternatives. Evidence from a project involving Bridgewater Associates, where researchers trained an open-source model on Bridgewater’s own financial expertise, resulted in a score of 84.7%.