Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines draws from Chinese rivals in debut AI model
Former OpenAI CTO’s start-up raised $2bn last year at $12bn valuation
Thinking Machines Lab has unveiled its first general-purpose AI model, with OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati leaning on cheap Chinese technology to develop its products.
The San Francisco-based “neo lab” on Wednesday said its Inkling foundation model’s architecture drew on China’s DeepSeek-V3 and has been refined post-training using data generated by Beijing-based Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5.
Its release comes at a time when China’s AI labs are gaining ground on US rivals. Chinese AI models have overtaken US counterparts in overall usage this year, according to data platform OpenRouter.
Leading US labs have repeatedly complained about Chinese rivals copying their models, including through so-called distillation — in which outputs from a larger “teacher” model train a smaller “student” model.
Thinking Machines’ Inkling ranks below the leading products from Anthropic and OpenAI as well as several Chinese models, according to benchmark data shared by the company.
But in contrast to the top ChatGPT and Claude models, Inkling will be open-weight, meaning users will be able to host the model on their servers and fine-tune it for specific use cases.
“Today we are advancing our mission by releasing a model we trained from scratch with the full weights available, so that people can make it their own,” the company said.
The debut model comes a year after the Thinking Machines closed a $2bn seed fundraising round at a $12bn post-money valuation, having received backing from Andreessen Horowitz alongside chipmakers Nvidia and AMD as well as hedge fund Jane Street.
The start-up has attracted attention thanks in part to Murati’s status in the AI industry, having worked on the development of several OpenAI products including ChatGPT, the Dall-E image generator and its voice mode.
She also played a leading role in the brief ousting of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman during a board coup in November 2023. The former OpenAI CTO departed in September 2024 before founding Thinking Machines in February last year.
Thinking Machines suffered a setback earlier this year when several senior staff members departed for Meta and OpenAI and questioned Murati’s leadership.
The start-up has moved forward with several products including its Tinker platform, which allows enterprise customers to fine-tune and customise large language models for their particular business applications.
Thinking Machines in a blog post on Friday said that most AI tools were “trained in a handful of places and then frozen” rather than being shaped by users. “Extending human will and judgment calls for AIs as diverse and distributed as people themselves are,” the company said.
Rivals including OpenAI offer open-weight models that are similarly customisable, while platforms such as Amazon and Microsoft boast services that enable users to fine-tune models using their own datasets.
Murati’s AI lab has also sought to differentiate itself by developing services that work in tandem with people in their daily lives.
In May, the start-up previewed its first “interaction model”, which can take actions based on users’ audio and video inputs rather than exclusively interpreting text.