Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, has released her first artificial intelligence model since departing the company, and it arrives with a notable distinction: it is fully open source.
A New Direction for a Familiar Name
Murati, who spent years steering technical development at OpenAI before her exit, has re-emerged with a model called Inkling. Rather than locking the technology behind closed doors, her new venture has chosen to make the model's weights openly available to developers, a decision that stands in contrast to the guarded approach favored by many of the largest AI labs in the West.
The move signals an intent to give Western developers a resource that has been in short supply. While open-weights models have proliferated in recent years, the most capable ones have increasingly come from Chinese research teams, leaving Western builders reliant either on those releases or on proprietary systems.
For Western developers hungry for open tools, Murati's release fills a gap that closed models never could.
How Inkling Stacks Up
The honest assessment is that Inkling is unlikely to unseat the top-performing Chinese open-weights models on raw benchmarks. Those systems have set a high bar, and Murati's debut release is not being positioned as an outright leader in performance.
Its value lies elsewhere. By offering a fully open alternative developed in the West, Inkling gives builders something they have not readily had: transparency, control, and the freedom to inspect and modify the underlying model without depending on overseas releases or restrictive licenses.
Key points of the release include:
- A fully open-source model, with weights made available to the developer community
- A Western-built alternative to the dominant Chinese open-weights options
- A first product milestone for Murati following her departure from OpenAI
What It Means Going Forward
For Murati, Inkling represents an early proof point for her post-OpenAI ambitions and a statement about how she believes advanced AI should be shared. The open-source strategy could help attract developers and researchers who prefer transparency over the black-box nature of commercial models.
Whether the model gains traction will depend on the community that forms around it and how quickly it evolves. But its arrival adds a new competitor to the open-source landscape and gives Western developers a homegrown option to build on.