Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raising $5 billion and releasing Inkling 2 Small

Thinking Machines Lab, an AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is raising $5 billion at a $40 billion pre-money valuation.

The company earlier raised $2 billion in a seed round at over a $10 billion valuation, but a later attempt at $50 billion fell apart. At the same time, it launched its second-gen model, Inkling 2 Small.

The new model uses a MoE architecture with 594B-A17B parameters, trained through four pre-training stages and 9 days of joint reinforcement training. The company says it scores much higher on analytical intelligence, with better coding, vision, knowledge work, and reasoning.

Inkling 2 Small will release its open weights next week under the Apache 2.0 license, so developers can get and use the model directly.