THE $40 BILLION SMALL

The story behind the cartoon

Business Insider reported Thursday evening that Thinking Machines Lab is raising $5 billion led by Accel at a $40 billion pre-money valuation, more than tripling its valuation from its last public round last year. Nvidia is separately in talks to invest about $2.5 billion, and the round could close as soon as this week.

The lab was founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati and raised a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz. It later sought a $50 billion to $60 billion valuation in a round that collapsed earlier this year.

The same day, the lab debuted Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active parameters, with weights planned for release next week after safety testing. Artificial Analysis said the model matches Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) in its index and would be the top open model outside China once its weights are out.

The joke is the price tag dwarfing the product: a worried robot shopkeeper presents the tiny 'Inkling 2 Small' box under a colossal $40,000,000,000 tag while grinning investors wave checkbooks and an unimpressed tabby cat watches — the small model, the very large price.

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