The AI boom has another giant-in-waiting. Thinking Machines, the lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has reached a reported valuation of about $12 billion — a striking figure for a young company built around research talent and a single flagship product.
That product, Tinker, is aimed at letting developers fine-tune and work with advanced AI models more flexibly. Coverage of the milestone this week has focused as much on the team Murati assembled as on the technology itself.
The valuation lands in a market where a handful of labs dominate headlines and compute budgets. Thinking Machines is pitching a different model: a research-driven lab whose tools help others build, rather than a single consumer chatbot.
Whether the bet pays off will depend on adoption. For now, the number tells its own story about artificial intelligence in 2026: investors are still willing to pay enormous sums for credible challengers.
