2026-07-19
The Woman Who Built ChatGPT Just Shipped a Model She Admits Isn't the Strongest — and Investors Are About to Value Her at $50 Billion
Yesterday Kimi K3 was still shouting "topped the charts, number one in the world." Today the woman who built ChatGPT did the exact opposite. On July 16, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released Inkling — a 975B open-weights model, natively multimodal, with adjustable thinking effort — yet in black and white the announcement says it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed." Meanwhile this company, just a year and a half old, is raising a new round at roughly a $50 billion valuation — four times last July's. Why is someone who shipped a model that isn't the strongest worth $50 billion? The answer hides in the thing she's best at, and the most expensive thing in the AI era: judging what actually makes a good product.
