This $12 billion startup finally shipped something...
Fireship
Jul 20, 2026
Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines, has released Inkling, an open-weights model that intentionally prioritizes efficiency and honesty over raw intelligence. By introducing a 'thinking effort' dial and training the model to admit uncertainty, they are positioning themselves as the go-to platform for specialized, cost-effective agentic workflows rather than competing with frontier models.
Key insight: Inkling was trained on 'epistemics,' a reinforcement learning technique that rewards the model for admitting when it doesn't know an answer, making it surprisingly superior at forecasting compared to larger, more confident models.
