Thinking Machines, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has released its first major language model under a fully open-source license. The model, called Inkling, is a massive multi-modal system with 975 billion total parameters, and it is available for anyone to download, modify, and use commercially under the Apache 2.0 license.
For Irish business owners who have been watching AI from the sidelines, this might sound like technical noise. But it actually represents a significant shift in how businesses can access and control AI technology.
What Makes Inkling Different
Most of the AI tools you hear about, like ChatGPT or Claude, are closed systems. You send data to a company’s servers, they run the model for you, and you pay per use. With Inkling, the model weights are freely available. You can download them and run the AI on your own computer or server.
Inkling handles text, images, and audio natively. It scored 77.6 percent on SWE-bench Verified, a standard software engineering benchmark, and 91.4 percent on VoiceBench for voice understanding. It is not the most powerful AI model available, but it is one of the most capable open-weight models ever released, and the license means there are no restrictions on how you use it.
Why This Matters for Irish Businesses
For a small business in Ireland, running your own AI model might sound expensive or technically daunting. But the landscape is changing fast. Here are three reasons open-source AI matters for your business:
Data privacy. When you use ChatGPT or other cloud AI services, your data leaves your control and goes to the provider’s servers. If you are handling customer information, financial records, or anything confidential, this should matter to you. An open model you run yourself keeps everything on your own systems.
Predictable costs. Cloud AI charges by the token. If your business starts using AI heavily, those costs can spiral quickly. With a self-hosted model, you buy the hardware once and the ongoing cost is just electricity. For businesses with high usage, this can work out dramatically cheaper over time.
No restrictions. Some cloud AI services refuse certain types of queries or return politically cautious responses. Inkling was explicitly designed to answer directly on sensitive topics while maintaining safety against genuinely harmful requests. For businesses that need straight answers without worrying about usage caps, this matters.
Is Running Your Own AI Practical?
Running a 975-billion parameter model requires serious hardware. You would need a powerful GPU setup to get reasonable speed. But Thinking Machines also released Inkling-Small, a 276-billion parameter version designed for lighter workloads. And the ecosystem of tools for running AI models locally is improving at a rapid pace.
For most Irish small businesses today, the practical answer is probably not to run your own model right now. But you should know that the option exists, and it is becoming more accessible every year. If you have sensitive data, high usage volumes, or a need for customisation, self-hosted AI is worth watching closely.
A Practical First Step
If you are curious about open-source AI, start small. Look at tools like Ollama or LM Studio, which let you run smaller AI models on a standard laptop for free. Try one out with some of your business data, nothing confidential at first, and see what the experience is like. Get comfortable with the idea of AI running on your own machine.
Inkling is a sign of where AI is heading: more open, more controllable, and more accessible to businesses that want to keep their data where it belongs. The question is whether your business is ready to take advantage of it when the time is right.