Frontier lab
Thinking Machines Lab
AI research and product company founded in 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati; makes the Tinker fine-tuning platform and the open-weight Inkling model.
Thinking Machines Lab is an AI research and product company founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, who serves as CEO. It is organized as a public benefit corporation. The founding team included several senior OpenAI alumni, among them John Schulman, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch and Luke Metz, and the company says its staff helped build ChatGPT, Character.ai, Mistral and open-source projects such as PyTorch.
The company describes its mission as making AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable, so that people can use AI for their own needs and goals. It emphasises open publication of research, human-AI collaboration, and a safety approach grounded in research and real-world testing. It does not use the term Super Intelligence in its public positioning.
In July 2025 the company raised about $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $12 billion valuation. Its first product, Tinker, launched in 2025 as a platform for building and fine-tuning custom models. In March 2026 NVIDIA announced a multi-year partnership to supply compute. In July 2026 the company released Inkling, its first general-purpose model, as open weights under an Apache 2.0 license, accepting text, image and audio input, with a smaller Inkling-Small previewed. In September 2026 it was reported to be raising more than $1 billion at a valuation above $40 billion.
Reports in 2026 said two co-founders left to rejoin OpenAI.
Key facts
- Founded: February 2025, by Mira Murati and former OpenAI colleagues
- Leadership: Mira Murati (CEO)
- Products: Tinker (fine-tuning platform), Inkling (open-weight model)
For current details see thinkingmachines.ai.