Thinking Machines Lab
US AI lab, and as of 2026-07-15 an open-weight one: it shipped Inkling, a 975B/41B Apache-2.0 multimodal MoE, plus a 276B/12B Inkling-Small in testing inkling-announcement.
Position on the map
A US open-weight lab that is neither a hyperscaler nor a Chinese lab — a slot the provider map didn’t have. The open field here has been qwen, deepseek, z-ai and mistral-ai, with google hedging via dual-track gemma-4. Willison frames Inkling as joining NVIDIA Nemotron and Gemma 4 in a thin US open-weights ecosystem inkling-willison-review.
The lab doesn’t claim the frontier — it says so in the announcement — and instead sells Tinker, a fine-tuning platform. The weights are free and the adaptation is the product. Compare mistral-ai, which also moved up-stack from open weights to a platform, but kept a proprietary frontier tier alongside; Thinking Machines skips the frontier claim entirely.
Caveat
One release, one page. Everything here rests on release-day material — the lab’s own announcement (T1) and one practitioner review (T2). No independent benchmark re-run, no track record, no pricing sheet.
Related
inkling · tinker · inkling-announcement · inkling-willison-review · open-weight-models · llm-provider · mistral-ai · google