Thinking Machines' first model, Inkling, lands behind China's best
Mira Murati's lab raised what was reported as the largest seed round in history. Its first model, Inkling, just shipped, and the announcement itself says it is not the strongest model available today. That sentence is the story.
Audio and images go straight into the token stream.
It takes audio and images raw, straight into the token stream, no separate encoders. Nine hundred and seventy five billion parameters, forty one billion active per token. And the full weights are downloadable now.
Their own table shows it trailing.
| Inkling | Nemotron 3 Ultra | Kimi K2.6 | GLM 5.2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HLE (text only) | 29.7 | 26.6 | 35.9 | 40.1 |
| Terminal Bench 2.1 | 63.8 | 56.4 | 71.3 | 82.7 |
| SWEBench Verified | 77.6 | 70.7 | 80.2 | 80.0 |
| FORTRESS Adversarial | 78.0 | 77.6 | 65.6 | 71.3 |
The numbers back the modesty. The lab's own table has it trailing GLM 5.2 on most raw scores. An independent index rates it the strongest Western open weights model, still behind the Chinese leader, despite its size. Then why ship it?
Same score. A third of the tokens.
The answer is a dial for how hard it thinks. On one benchmark, the lab reports, it matches Nemotron 3 Ultra at roughly a third of the tokens. Not the strongest model. The cheapest path to yours. The weights are free, because the fine tuning platform, Tinker, is the product.
It compressed its own chain of thought.
Across more than thirty million reinforcement learning rollouts, the model compressed its own chain of thought. Early traces read like prose. Late ones read like a telegram. Nobody asked it to. Saving tokens alone drove it.
Full weights on Hugging Face, day one.
The weights are on Hugging Face, original and quantized, Apache licensed with an acceptable use policy attached. Day one support spans the major hosts and inference stacks. A smaller sibling is previewed, not yet released.
Their words: not the strongest.
Not the strongest model. Their words. The bet is that a tunable, open base is worth more than a leaderboard crown. Watch what gets built on it.
