Inkling

Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's inaugural open-weights foundation model, designed as a broad, balanced generalist optimized for customization rather than benchmark dominance. With 975B total parameters (41B active) via a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, it natively processes text, images, and audio through a unified encoder-free design. The model's key innovation is its controllable thinking effort, allowing developers to dial the reasoning budget from 0.2 to 0.99 to precisely balance performance against token cost and latency.

Positioned as a practical multimodal foundation for enterprise fine-tuning, Inkling achieves competitive but not state-of-the-art performance across reasoning, coding, and safety benchmarks while offering unique advantages in native multimodality, token efficiency, and true open-source licensing (Apache 2.0). It excels in agentic workflows and represents the leading open-weights model from a U.S. lab, though it trails specialized Chinese open models on pure reasoning and top closed models on peak capabilities.

The release signals Thinking Machines' focus on building customizable, efficient, and trustworthy AI systems rather than pursuing frontier scale alone. The model is available for immediate fine-tuning via the company's Tinker platform, with full weights on HuggingFace and partnerships with major inference providers for deployment.