Post by Jakub Polec

Mira Murati raised a record $2B seed round at a $12B valuation. Her first model is not closed, not pay-per-token, and not even positioned as frontier. Inkling is a 975B-parameter multimodal model with 41B active parameters, a 1M-token context window, and 77.6% on SWE-bench Verified. The weights are available under Apache 2.0. That is not generosity. It is distribution. Closed labs sell access to intelligence. Thinking Machines gives away the base model and sells Tinker—the infrastructure enterprises use to fine-tune it on proprietary data. The model is the free sample. The customization platform is the business. A bank or defense contractor may not need the world’s smartest general model. It may need a model it can own, control, deploy privately, and teach its own workflows. Murati openly admits Inkling is not frontier. That admission may be the smartest part of the launch.