Mira Murati, the former OpenAI executive, has released her first AI model since leaving the company. The model, called Inkling, is fully open source. It gives Western developers a new option in a field where Chinese open-weights models have lately dominated the top spots.
What Inkling is — and isn't
Inkling doesn't beat the best Chinese open-weights models on benchmarks. That's a straightforward fact. But Murati's team didn't position it as a leaderboard-topper. Instead, they focused on openness and accessibility. The model's weights and code are freely available, letting anyone download, modify, or build on top of it.
For Western developers, that matters. Many of the highest-performing open-source models today come from Chinese labs. Those models are powerful, but they operate under different regulatory and geopolitical constraints. Inkling offers a Western alternative — one that isn't tethered to a big tech company or a foreign government.
Why the open-source angle matters
Open-source AI has become a fast-moving battlefield. Companies like Meta and Mistral release models under permissive licenses, but their models still carry corporate restrictions. Fully open-weight releases — where the model can be inspected, fine-tuned, and redistributed without gatekeeping — are rarer.
Chinese models like Qwen and DeepSeek have filled that gap, gaining wide adoption. But some developers and enterprises prefer a model built in a more familiar legal and regulatory environment. Inkling steps into that space.
It's not a moonshot. It's a practical tool. Murati's move signals that she sees a market for AI that isn't about chasing the biggest number on a benchmark — it's about giving people control.
A post-OpenAI career takes shape
Murati left OpenAI in late 2024 after a tumultuous period inside the company. She had been a key figure in the launch of ChatGPT and DALL-E. Since her departure, speculation about her next move has been intense.
Inkling is her first public answer. The model is small enough to run on consumer hardware, which is a deliberate choice. It's designed for tinkerers, startups, and researchers who want to experiment without a cloud budget.
That puts it in direct competition with other lightweight open models — but again, not on raw performance. The pitch is sovereignty and simplicity.
There's no word yet on whether Murati plans to build a company around Inkling or keep it as a research project. The model's repo is live, and the community is already digging in.
