Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab Raises $5B at $40B Valuation
Artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is reportedly raising $5 billion at a $40 billion pre-money valuation. Concurrently, the lab announced its Inkling 2 Small MoE model, which will be released under an Apache 2.0 open-weight license. This massive funding round highlights the sustained investor appetite for elite AI talent and infrastructure, even as some previous high-valuation talks experienced friction. Furthermore, releasing powerful models under permissive licenses like Apache 2.0 continues to drive open-weight ecosystem growth and competition in the AI industry. The newly announced Inkling 2 Small model uses a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture with a 594B total parameter count and 17B active parameters (594B-A17B), having undergone four pre-training stages and 9 days of joint reinforcement training. It is slated for open release the following week.
## BACKGROUND
Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a deep learning architecture where multiple specialized sub-networks ('experts') handle different subsets of data, controlled by a gating network to improve computational efficiency. Apache 2.0 is a permissive free software license that allows developers to freely use, modify, and distribute the software or model weights for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.