Mira Murati raises $2bn, ships first AI model after turmoil

The startup founded by Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer, has unveiled its first artificial intelligence model, named Inkling, after a year of silence and near-crippling internal conflict. Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion from investors (more than 40 billion crowns) at a $12 billion valuation, but for a full year it shipped no real product — now that has changed.

The company itself admits the new model is not the best on the market. Inkling falls short not only of flagships like ChatGPT or Claude but, according to benchmark tests, even some free Chinese models. For Murati's business strategy, however, that is not so critical.

Unlike conventional consumer chatbots, Inkling is a so-called “open-weight” model. Any client — a bank, a hospital or a defence company — can download it for free and install it on its own secure servers, without sending sensitive data into someone else's cloud.

The model has 975 billion parameters, but activates only about 41 billion of them for any given query — which markedly cuts computing costs and response times. Thinking Machines' business model is not built on selling the smartest general-purpose AI, but on a bet that a mid-strength model, precisely fine-tuned for a specific company, will outperform universal giants that know nothing about that client's business.

That is exactly the problem the heads of major corporations — Palantir's Alex Karp and Microsoft's Satya Nadella — have been warning about in recent days: by feeding their unique data into public models, companies pay twice, once in subscription fees and once by handing over their intellectual property.

That is why Murati's company gives away the Inkling model itself for free, planning to make money instead on Tinker, a cloud tool for securely fine-tuning the model on a client's own data. The world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, has already confirmed the approach works: a model fine-tuned via Tinker outperformed costly versions of ChatGPT and Claude in quality, while costing roughly 13 times less to run.

The model's release was the result of a very difficult journey. Back in January, a funding round that would have valued the company at nearly $50 billion quietly fell through. Investors grew nervous, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg began circling the project with offers to buy out the entire startup along with its team — some co-founders supported the idea, but Murati insisted on keeping the company independent.

The most serious blows came from within. According to The New York Times, after a secret workplace relationship came to light, Murati curtailed the authority of key co-founder and chief technology officer Barret Zoph. Unwilling to accept the demotion and frustrated by his loss of influence and the stalling business, he began secretly negotiating a return to rival OpenAI starting in the autumn.