Thinking Machines, the AI lab founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is negotiating to raise at least $1 billion in funding at a $40 billion-plus pre-money valuation, with Accel reportedly leading the round.
Barret Zoph, co-founder of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, has joined Google DeepMind as vice president of research. The move follows his abrupt departure from Thinking Machines after a conflict with CEO Murati and a brief tenure at OpenAI lasting less than six months.
Released July 15, 2026 by Thinking Machines Lab, Inkling is a 975-billion parameter open-weights Mixture-of-Experts model with 41 billion active parameters, a 1-million-token context window, and native multimodal input support across text, image, audio, and video.
AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, a 975-billion parameter mixture-of-experts model with open weights designed for enterprise customization and on-premises deployment. The company explicitly positions the model as focused on customizability rather than benchmark dominance.
A federal jury unanimously dismissed all of Musk's claims against OpenAI, Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft on statute of limitations grounds — after less than two hours of deliberation. The merits were never decided: whether OpenAI breached its founding mission remains an open question, and Musk has announced an appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
Altman's testimony on May 12 inverted Musk's central claim: OpenAI didn't steal a charity — it built one. But his disclosure that Musk sought 90% equity raises the question the trial now turns on: was this ever about the mission, or always about control?
A structured essay on the OpenAI vs Musk dispute as a governance question: whether a mission-driven AI organization can change its structure, raise massive capital, partner with major technology companies, and still claim continuity with its original public-benefit purpose. The article argues that the case matters less as founder drama and more as a test of institutional design for the next era of AI.
