Mira Murati spent two years building something new after leaving OpenAI, finally revealing it to the public last week. Inkling, the first model from Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, is also the best open-source model trained from scratch by a Western lab. Western labs have been losing the open-source race—Mistral's April release landed against a leaderboard dominated by Alibaba’s Qwen, Z.ai’s GLM, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi. Nvidia’s Nemotron, the lone Western model on the leaderboard, is far from being considered “state of the art.” Inkling arrives with no regional strings and full weights on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0.