Mira Murati, former Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, founded the artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab. The company’s first release of a general-purpose large model has attracted attention due to its technical origins.
According to a report by the British 'Financial Times' on July 15, Thinking Machine stated that the company's latest released general-purpose model, 'Inkling', was inspired by the DeepSeek-V3 model from Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. During the post-training phase, data generated using the large model Kimi K2.5 from Beijing Moonshot AI was used for optimization.
The report indicates that the release of Inkling coincides with Chinese AI companies rapidly catching up with their American counterparts. According to data from the AI platform OpenRouter, Chinese AI models have surpassed their American competitors in terms of overall usage since this year began.
This change has also alerted the AI industry in the United States. Several leading AI companies in the US have previously been accused of copying Chinese companies' model capabilities through methods such as “distillation”.
OpenAI's Former Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Bloomberg
However, in terms of performance, Inkling still does not rank among the top models in the industry. Benchmarking data released by Thinking Machine shows that this model lags behind leading products from OpenAI and Anthropic, and is also lower than some Chinese AI models.
Unlike mainstream closed-source models such as ChatGPT and Claude, Inkling adopts an “open-weight” approach. Users can deploy the model on their own servers and fine-tune it according to specific application scenarios.
The thinking machine states that the model released this time is a product 'trained from scratch and with complete weights available', aiming to allow users to adjust and modify the model according to their own needs.
Last year, Thought Machine completed a seed round of financing worth $2 billion, with a post-funding valuation reaching $12 billion. The investors included Andersen Horwath, NVIDIA, AMD, and the hedge fund Jane Street.
Currently, thinking machines are trying to find differentiated advantages through open models and 'human-machine collaboration' approaches. The company states that most current AI tools are 'fixed after being trained by a few institutions'. In the future, artificial intelligence should be more open, allowing users to participate in shaping the capabilities of the models.
Reports indicate that the launch of Inkling reflects a changing global AI landscape: American companies still have advantages in terms of funding, computational power, and top talent. However, Chinese AI companies, with their low-cost and efficient model development capabilities, are becoming an important technological source for the global artificial intelligence industry.
