The New Enterprise Battle Over Who Owns the Model
July 16, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe New Enterprise Battle Over Who Owns the Model
The month of models continues, and the most significant development may not be about which model scores highest on benchmarks, but about a fundamental shift in how enterprises are being pitched on AI. Thinking Machines Lab released its first large language model, Inkling, and while its performance is solidly mid-tier, the real story is what it represents: a bet that enterprises will pay for the ability to fine-tune their own models on their own data, rather than renting tokens from frontier labs. Microsoft is pushing the same thesis. And that convergence — across a buzzy new lab and the most established enterprise software company in the world — is worth paying attention to.
The Inkling Release: Mid-Tier Performance, Novel Positioning
Thinking Machines Lab, the spin-off founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling on Wednesday. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active parameters, supports a million-token context window, and reasons natively across text, images, and audio. A smaller 12-billion-parameter version, Inkling Small, was also released in preview.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Overview & Headlines Teaser** - Host introduces the "month of models" theme and previews top stories: Apple chip acquisition hunt, Microsoft competing with OpenAI/Anthropic, and Cursor deepening its model game.
- 2 (00:43) **Cursor's Internal Strategy Revealed** - CEO Michael Troll told staff in a May all-hands that Cursor aims to become a top-tier model developer, targeting a state-of-the-art model by end of 2024 and frontier-pushing compute advantage by 2027.
- 3 (02:36) **SpaceX Stock Dips Below IPO Price** - SpaceX traded down to $133, breaking its $135 IPO price for the first time, closing at $135.27 and down 33% from all-time high; Elon Musk lost trillionaire status.
- 4 (03:58) **Nvidia's New Open-Source Physical AI Model** - Cosmos 3 Edge (4B parameters) is designed for edge robotics, functioning as both a world model and vision-language model.
- 5 (04:55) **Physical AI Detour: Chip Motors** - A new AI-integrated family vehicle that can run errands and park itself, representing a novel take on AI in the physical world.
- 6 (05:55) **Apple Shopping for AI Chip Acquisitions** - Apple is reportedly far along in efforts to buy a chipmaker, a departure from its historic avoidance of large acquisitions.
- 7 (07:41) **Microsoft Prepares to Compete Head-to-Head with OpenAI & Anthropic** - Sales staff are being trained to push Microsoft's in-house MAI models, emphasizing efficiency, cost, and vertical integration over model quality.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Thinking Machines Lab’s new open-weight model Inkling may signal a new enterprise battle over who controls the model, the data, and the learning built on top of it. NLW explores its promise—and why fine-tuning may be harder than advocates suggest. In the headlines: Cursor, Apple’s AI chip hunt, and Microsoft’s model push.
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