Thinking Machines has released Inkling, an open-weights large language model under an Apache 2.0 license. This model is designed for enterprises seeking customization and control, capable of running on-premises or in private clouds. Inkling is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts system with 975 billion total parameters, handling text, images, and audio. It features a unique "controllable thinking effort" mechanism to balance cost and performance. Performance benchmarks show Inkling is sub state-of-the-art but competitive, particularly excelling in software engineering and voice understanding against some US rivals. However, Chinese models like GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro outperform it on coding and complex reasoning tasks. Inkling also demonstrates a notable ability to answer directly on censored topics while maintaining strong safety against malicious queries. The model's architecture uses relative positional embeddings and an encoder-free early fusion approach for multimodality. Its release under a permissive Apache 2.0 license is a significant draw for developers wanting royalty-free commercial use. Community reaction has been positive, commending the model's openness and engineering feat.