Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, just launched her first model, and its whole design is a challenge to the way the AI industry works. Her startup, Thinking Machines, released Inkling, an open-weight model with 975 billion parameters. Where most top labs sell access to a smart model they keep locked up, Murati is handing companies a model they can take, change, and truly own.
What Inkling is
Inkling is an open-weight model, which means the actual trained model, its weights, are available for companies to download, run, and customize on their own infrastructure. At 975 billion parameters, it is big enough to be genuinely capable, not a toy. The difference from a ChatGPT or a Claude is not just size, it is ownership. With a closed model you rent intelligence through an API and live with whatever the lab decides. With an open-weight model you can fine-tune it on your own data, run it privately, and keep it running exactly as it is for as long as you want.
The bet against the industry
The prevailing strategy at the biggest labs is to build the single smartest model and rent it to everyone. Murati is betting the opposite: that businesses do not actually want the smartest model, they want a model they control. For a bank, a hospital, or a government, ownership, privacy, and stability can matter more than topping a benchmark. Inkling is a wager that the future of enterprise AI is owned, not rented, and that a very good model you control beats a slightly better one you do not.
What it means for your business
For most companies the practical question is simple: how much do you need to own your AI? If your work touches sensitive data, strict regulation, or processes you cannot afford to have change underneath you, an open-weight model you host yourself starts to look very attractive. If you just need a capable assistant and speed matters more than control, renting a closed model is still the easier path. Inkling gives that first group a serious new option.
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There is a strategic angle too. When a former OpenAI CTO launches a giant open-weight model, it puts pressure on the closed labs to justify their prices and their lock-in. More competition on the open side tends to push costs down and choice up for everyone, even companies that never touch Inkling directly.
Murati helped build one of the most powerful closed models in the world. Now she is betting the next winners will be the companies that want to own their AI, not just borrow the best one.
