Inkling (Databricks)

Inkling is described in independent reporting as the first general-purpose release from Thinking Machines Lab, the San Francisco startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and it is positioned as a US-developed option in the open-weight model market. The system is reported at roughly 975 billion parameters and ships with openly available weights, a scale that places it among the largest openly distributed language models to date. Its reported purpose is broad enterprise and developer use, framed as a credible domestic alternative for organizations that want frontier-scale reasoning without committing to closed APIs.

On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Inkling is reported to score 41, a result that independent coverage characterizes as leading every US open model while still trailing the strongest open releases out of China. That combination of scale, open distribution, and a competitive intelligence-index score suggests a practical fit for teams that need strong general reasoning and tool use, want to self-host or fine-tune, and prefer a US-origin stack. For builders comparing open-weight options, the reported positioning is that of a flagship US entrant that excels domestically but faces stiffer competition from leading Chinese open models at the very top of the benchmark table.