Is Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of thinkingmachines.ai plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-07-18

How to check right now

Known issues we've tracked

LAUNCH (2026-07-15): Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's first-ever model release -- open weights on Hugging Face (original + NVFP4 checkpoints), 975B total / 41B active MoE, native text+image+audio input, up to 1M context, pretrained on 45T tokens. **Inkling-Small** (276B total / 12B active) shipped alongside in preview, 'matching or exceeding its larger sibling on many benchmarks' per the vendor. Available on Tinker at launch (64K/256K context options, 50% launch discount) and via TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, and Baseten. Strategy note: the company explicitly frames Inkling as a customization substrate monetized through Tinker fine-tuning, not a chatbot -- TechCrunch: revenue depends on the platform, not model distribution. Funding context: a reported ~$50B round was said to be coming together last November but had stalled by January (company declined comment)
2026-07-15Thinking Machines Lab (thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/), TechCrunch (2026-07-15), Reuters, Axios
Vendor benchmark tables were not published as a simple comparative suite at launch, and the company itself disclaims SOTA -- treat any specific Inkling benchmark numbers circulating on aggregators as unverified until third-party evals (Artificial Analysis, LMArena) publish
2026-07-15thinkingmachines.ai launch post (no comparative benchmark table), TechCrunch

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) is down

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About Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab)

Tier A (8.0/10). Mira Murati's $12B lab ships its first model (2026-07-15): a 975B/41B-active open-weights MoE that reasons natively over text, images, and audio with a 1M-token context -- positioned not as the strongest model, but as the best starting point for fine-tuning via Tinker