Story perspectives

Open-Source 975B Inkling Model Matches Nvidia Benchmark

7/16/2026

Summary

Inkling Released

Thinking Machines Lab released its open-weight model Inkling on July 15, 2026.
Inkling has 975 billion parameters, activates about 41 billion per query, was trained on 45 trillion multimodal tokens, and is released under an Apache 2.0 license with weights on Hugging Face for fine-tuning via the Tinker platform.
Thinking Machines says Inkling matches Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra on a coding benchmark while using about one-third the tokens, and a 276-billion-parameter Inkling-Small preview is available.

Summary

Kimi Beats GPT

Kimi K2.6 edged past GPT-5.5 on the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, marking the first open-weight win over a leading proprietary model.
Chinese open models now handle roughly 45 percent of enterprise tokens routed through OpenRouter, reshaping U.S. AI consumption patterns.
Coinbase halved its AI spending after migrating its agents to the Chinese GLM and Kimi models.
Cursor’s Composer model was built on Kimi, illustrating growing reliance on Chinese open-source foundations.

History

Historical Context

OpenAI’s staged 2019 release of the 1.5-billion-parameter GPT-2 model showed that large language models could be shared publicly. This spurred open-weight projects like Mistral AI’s 7-billion-parameter model and DeepSeek’s 671-billion-parameter R1, launched in January 2025, which rival proprietary systems. The surge has heightened competition in the 2020s, driving vendors to cut prices and widening enterprise use of LLMs.

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Inkling Released

Thinking Machines Lab released its open-weight model Inkling on July 15, 2026.
Inkling has 975 billion parameters, activates about 41 billion per query, was trained on 45 trillion multimodal tokens, and is released under an Apache 2.0 license with weights on Hugging Face for fine-tuning via the Tinker platform.
Thinking Machines says Inkling matches Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 Ultra on a coding benchmark while using about one-third the tokens, and a 276-billion-parameter Inkling-Small preview is available.

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