[AINews] Thinky's Inkling: 975B-A41B multimodal, new best American Apache 2.0 open model (with Inkling-Small, 276B-A12B)

Thinky only seems to come up for air once every few months; most recently with Interaction models - but each time they do they impress, showing both taste and depth. Today they introduced Inkling — not a SOTA model, but a very solid new family for a baseline American open model: Our model, called Inkling, is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975B total parameters, 41B active. It supports a context window of up to 1M tokens. It was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video. It is the first in a family of models of different sizes: alongside it we are sharing a preview of Inkling-Small, a lighter-weight model with 12B active parameters, trained with a similar recipe, that achieves strong performance with even lower cost and latency. Inkling reasons natively over text, images, and audio, and balances cost with performance through efficient and controllable thinking effort The Huggingface breakdown covers some interesting technical highlights: AI News for 7/14/2026-7/15/2026. We checked 12 subreddits, 544 Twitters and no further Discords. AINews’ website lets you search all past issues. As a reminder, AINews is now a section of Latent Space . You can opt in/out of email frequencies! AI Twitter Recap What happened Thinking Machines Lab launched Inkling, its first fully released open-weights foundation model family entry, positioning it as a customizable multimodal base model rather than a benchmark-maxed flagship. Thinking Machines announced Inkling as an open-weights model that “reasons efficiently across text, image, and audio modalities,” with full weights available and immediate support on its Tinker platform and Playground @thinkymachines . Mira Murati described Inkling as the company’s “first model,” “trained from scratch,” with open weights and same-day fine-tuning on Tinker @miramurati . Soumith Chintala framed it as Thinking Machines’ “first general model,” stressing open weights, 975B parameters, native multimodality, and…