OpenAI's Former CTO Mira Murati Unveils AI Model Through Thinking Machines

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer, moved the spotlight back to her startup Thinking Machines Lab with the release of Inkling, the company's first publicly available AI model . Inkling is an open-weights, Mixture-of-Experts model with 975 billion total parameters (about 41 billion active at any time), built to reason across text, images, audio and video, positioning Thinking Machines as a direct challenger to established labs like OpenAI and Anthropic roughly a year and a half after Murati left OpenAI to found the company .

Inkling is released under an Apache 2.0 license, making it freely available for commercial and research use, a notably more open stance than the closed models offered by OpenAI and Anthropic. The multimodal design, which extends beyond text into audio and video understanding, reflects Thinking Machines' strategy of competing on customization and openness rather than trying to out-scale rivals purely on parameter count .

Separately, in the same news cycle, Atlassian announced new AI-native software development tools for its Jira platform aimed at coordinating AI agents and human developers. While unrelated to Murati's launch, the announcement reflects the broader push by established software vendors to embed AI more deeply into developer workflows even as well-funded startups like Thinking Machines compete for the underlying model layer.

For investors, Inkling's release is a reminder that the foundation-model race remains unsettled even among well-capitalized private labs. Its open-weights approach could accelerate adoption among developers who want to fine-tune or self-host models, but Thinking Machines will still need to prove it can translate technical credibility into a sustainable commercial business as it competes against far larger, better-funded rivals.