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.
Thinking Machines has released Inkling-Small, an open-weights Mixture-of-Experts transformer model with 276 billion parameters that achieves performance comparable to its larger predecessor Inkling while being one-quarter the size.
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.
Meta has hired five founders from Thinking Machines Lab, continuing a string of high-profile departures from the AI startup that raised $2 billion last year. The hires are part of what Fortune described as Anthropic winning a 'one-sided talent war.'
