Axios (Jul 15, 2026): Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines released Inkling, betting enterprises want customizable AI rather than renting from a few frontier labs.
Notable points:
- First foundational model release from Thinking Machines
- Used data generated by existing open models — including Kimi K2.5 from Moonshot AI — in final training phase
- Full weights on Hugging Face; live for fine-tuning on Tinker
- Inkling-Small preview; weights after testing
- Murati context: was at OpenAI in 2019 when GPT-2 full version withheld; open-weight strategy may remain case-by-case
- Funding: record 12B valuation in 2025 before product release
- Bottom line: first real test of whether funding translates into enterprise customization alternative
Distillation/synthetic-data use of Chinese open models (Kimi K2.5) is Axios reporting — confirm against primary blog if citing as fact.