# Thinking Machines Lab

> Thinking Machines Lab is Mira Murati's San Francisco AI research and product company. Its wager is that the next useful leap in AI will come not merely from a larger general model, but from giving researchers and companies the tools to shape models around their own data, judgment and work. Tinker sells managed post-training infrastructure; Inkling and Inkling-Small provide open-weight, multimodal starting points; and the lab's interaction research tries to make AI a live collaborator rather than a prompt box.

- **Founded:** 2025
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, United States
- **Founders:** Mira Murati (Cofounder and CEO), John Schulman (Cofounder and Chief Scientist), Barret Zoph (Cofounder and former CTO; departed 2026), Lilian Weng (Cofounder; departed 2026), Andrew Tulloch (Cofounder; departed 2025), Luke Metz (Cofounder; departed 2026)
- **Products:** Tinker, Tinker Cookbook, TML-Interaction-Small research preview, Inkling, Inkling-Small
- **Notable:** Raised a $2 billion seed round, widely reported as the largest seed financing on record., Took Tinker from private beta in October 2025 to general availability with vision support in December 2025., Released full weights for the 975B-parameter Inkling and the more efficient 276B-parameter Inkling-Small in July 2026.

## Products & services

- **Tinker** — A managed training API and SDK for supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and model evaluation. Users control data and algorithms while Thinking Machines handles distributed GPU infrastructure, scheduling and failure recovery.
- **Tinker Cookbook** — An Apache-2.0 open-source library of practical post-training recipes built on the Tinker API.
- **TML-Interaction-Small research preview** — A 276B-total, 12B-active multimodal interaction model designed around simultaneous audio, video and text micro-turns for live human collaboration.
- **Inkling** — A 975B-total, 41B-active open-weight mixture-of-experts model with a one-million-token context window and native text, image and audio reasoning, available for download and Tinker fine-tuning.
- **Inkling-Small** — A 276B-total, 12B-active open-weight model intended to deliver much of Inkling's capability at lower compute cost and latency.

## Achievements

- Raised a $2 billion seed round, widely reported as the largest seed financing on record.
- Took Tinker from private beta in October 2025 to general availability with vision support in December 2025.
- Released full weights for the 975B-parameter Inkling and the more efficient 276B-parameter Inkling-Small in July 2026.
- Secured an NVIDIA partnership targeting at least one gigawatt of next-generation Vera Rubin capacity.
- Glean reported 50% lower search latency and 25% fewer tokens for a specialist model trained with Tinker.
- Trajectory reported a 5% to 25% pass-rate improvement on APEX-Agents and a 2x wall-clock speedup after repairing an unstable off-policy training recipe.
- Its open-source Tinker Cookbook passed 4,000 GitHub stars by September 2026.
- A UIUC and Bridgewater AIA Labs collaboration using Tinker reported state-of-the-art text-to-SQL performance in August 2026.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Accel was reported to be discussing a $1 billion round at a valuation of at least $40 billion; the company had not confirmed that the round closed.
- **2026-08** — Published a collaboration reporting state-of-the-art text-to-SQL results and announced safety research grants.
- **2026-07** — Released Inkling and Inkling-Small with open weights; cofounder Lilian Weng stepped down and later returned to OpenAI.
- **2026-05** — Previewed interaction models designed for simultaneous, real-time multimodal collaboration.
- **2026-04** — A multibillion-dollar, non-exclusive Google Cloud infrastructure agreement was reported.
- **2026-03** — Announced a gigawatt-scale NVIDIA partnership and strategic investment.
- **2026-01** — Cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz left for OpenAI; Soumith Chintala became CTO.

## Links

- Website: https://thinkingmachines.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thinkingmachinesai/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/thinkymachines
- GitHub: https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thinkymachines

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/thinking-machines-lab
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-28