← Front page

The AI Daily Brief · Thursday, July 16, 2026

Thinking Machines Lab Releases Inkling Model, Sparking Debate on Performance and Potential

Thinking Machines Lab (TML) has released its first large language model, Inkling, a 975 billion parameter model with multimodal capabilities. While some users have criticized its performance and perceived inaccuracies, others believe it shows promise for future development and fine-tuning.

personMira MuratipersonJack RpersonSimon SmithpersonJan Fang JiangcompanyThinking Machines LabcompanyOpenAIcompanyTML

The tape

4 quotes
Thinking Machines Lab has released their first large language model. Called Inkling, the model is built on a mixture of experts architecture with 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active parameters.
Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed. Instead, a combination of qualities makes it a good open weight space for customization, multimodal capabilities, efficient thinking, and availability on Tinker for fine tuning.
Benchmarks don't look that great. It's basically another Kimmy K 2.6 and loses to all closed models and GLM 5.2 and Fable 5.
Laon Scaling one
This is going to be an important model in a few years. TML's talent, know how, funding and compute, they will soon reach opus if not Fable 5 level.
Jan Fang Jiang
Heard on The AI Daily Brief — “The New Enterprise Battle Over Who Owns the Model, published Thursday, July 16, 2026. Heardvine summarizes and quotes with attribution and timestamps, and links to the original everywhere.
Transcribed via Gemini audio transcription · $0.04
Thinking Machines Lab Releases Inkling Model, Sparking Debate on Performance and Potential — Heardvine