Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab ships its first public AI model
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati released Inkling, an open-weight model built around her thesis that AI should extend human judgment rather than replace it.
Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released its first AI model for broad use, called Inkling. The model is open-weight, meaning developers can download and customize it directly, and is built to process queries across different media while balancing cost against performance.
The release follows an essay Murati published days earlier laying out the lab's worldview: that useful knowledge is "tacit, local and dispersed," so AI built to genuinely help people needs to be distributed and customizable rather than centralized in a handful of closed models.
A different bet on AI
Inkling is part of what Murati calls "interaction models" – systems designed for people to collaborate with more naturally, rather than simply query. It's a notable data point for a company led by one of the highest-profile women in frontier AI, now shipping product rather than raising capital on reputation alone.