Thinking Machines launches first open-weight model, tops US rankings

Thinking Machines Lab has released its first open-weight model, called Inkling. According to community benchmarks, Inkling beats other US-made open-weight models, including NVIDIA's Nemotron Ultra, making it the top-ranked US open-weight model. Across all open-weight models globally, it lands around 5th place.

Open-weight models — ones where the trained parameters are published so anyone can download and run them directly — have recently been dominated by Chinese labs, so this release is being seen as a notable step for US labs catching up in that space. Detailed benchmark results have also been shared separately by the community to back up these performance claims.