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On 2026-07-15 Thinking Machines released Inkling

2026-07-15 · 20:41 UTC ·@AlexFinn ·1 min read

Brief

Thinking Machines announced Inkling on 2026-07-15: an open-weights, multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with controllable reasoning effort, available for fine-tuning on Tinker and the Inkling Playground. @AlexFinn asserts it "beats GLM 5.2", says Thinking Machines + NVIDIA mark U.S. entry into the local-AI race vs. China, warns current runs need serious hardware, and urges preparing via Hermes/OpenClaw to load upcoming smaller quantized versions for single Mac Studio use.

Why it matters

On 2026-07-15 Thinking Machines released Inkling: an open-weights, multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with controllable reasoning effort; full weights are available and it can be fine-tuned on Tinker and tried in the Inkling Playground.

Key details

  • @AlexFinn claims Inkling "BEATS GLM 5.2" and frames Thinking Machines + NVIDIA as a U.S. entry into the local-AI race challenging China's dominance of open-source AI.
  • Author warns Inkling currently requires "pretty serious hardware" to run, predicts smaller quantized models ('smaller quants') soon that will allow running on a single Mac Studio, and urges using Hermes/OpenClaw to inspect hardware, recommend runnable models, and load them.
Source evidence

Today is a great day

Another U.S. based company entered the local AI race

Thinking Machines released Inkling, an open source model that BEATS GLM 5.2 in a lot of ways

China has DOMINATED the open source AI space. Now Thinking Machines + Nvidia is taking them on

Right now you need some pretty serious hardware to run this model

Smaller quants will be coming soon which will allow you to run this on a single Mac Studio

In the meantime I HIGHLY recommend you get prepared for better/smaller local models coming soon

Go to your Hermes/OpenClaw. Ask it to look at your hardware specs. Have it recommend models you can run today. Have it load the models.

Local AI is a train you will not be stopping anytime soon. Especially now that America has entered the race 🇺🇸

Thinking Machines (@thinkymachines)

Today, we are introducing Inkling.

Inkling reasons efficiently across text, image, and audio modalities. We are making the full weights available.

thinkingmachines.ai/news/int…

Available today for fine-tuning on Tinker. Play with it in the Inkling Playground. 🧵

Link

Inkling: Our open-weights model

Our first open-weights model: multimodal, Mixture-of-Experts, with controllable reasoning effort. Available to fine-tune on Tinker.
thinkingmachines.ai

— https://nitter.net/thinkymachines/status/2077454609551921208#m