OpenAI's ex-CTO Mira Murati launches open-weight AI model Inkling, focusing on customizability and cost balance

Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, has launched her first AI model, Inkling, through her company Thinking Machines Lab. The model uses an open-weight approach, letting developers tweak it with their own data. Inkling has 975 billion parameters, but only 41 billion are active, designed to balance performance and cost.

The model's base architecture borrows from China's DeepSeek-V3, and it was fine-tuned using data from Kimi K2.5 by Moonshot AI. Thinking Machines says Inkling isn't the most powerful model out there, but it's well-rounded and flexible for different tasks.

Unlike top labs like OpenAI and Anthropic that focus on raw power, Inkling cuts costs and speeds up by activating only part of its parameters. Users can customize it via Tinker, a cloud tool that lets developers train big models without managing complex infrastructure.

Safety tests show Inkling handles risks like bioweapons and hacking well. But the company is still working on safety features due to the open-weight model, a concern raised by closed-model developers.