Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, with a team of researchers from OpenAI, Meta and Mistral. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is chief scientist. It is one of the best-funded “neolabs” trying to compete with the established frontier players.

Funding

In July 2025 it raised about $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with investors including Nvidia, AMD and Cisco, one of the largest early-stage rounds on record. In March 2026 it announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia for about a gigawatt of computing capacity.

Products

• Tinker (October 2025): an API that makes it easy to fine-tune open-weights models
• Inkling (July 15, 2026): a 975-billion-parameter open-weights model under the Apache licence, aimed at enterprises that want to customise their own models
• Inkling Small (July 31, 2026): a 276-billion-parameter distilled version
• Interaction models (research preview, May 2026): systems that process continuous streams of audio, video and text in real time rather than turn-by-turn chat

Notable events

In January 2026, co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz departed and returned to OpenAI (reports differ on whether Zoph left or was dismissed). The company is structured as a public benefit corporation, with Murati holding weighted voting control. It is not a signatory of the SI Accord.