Thinking Machines ships Inkling, open weights built to be forked — Jul 16

Thinking Machines Lab shipped its first model today, a deliberately mid open-weights giant built to sell fine-tuning through Tinker rather than win a leaderboard. xAI's three-day pivot from a repo-exfiltration scandal to open-sourcing Grok Build shows vendor response speed is becoming the trust metric that matters most. Nvidia pushes deeper into Japan's sovereign AI buildout, extending the same compute-nationalism arc that's been building since South Korea's megaproject.