Speaking as somebody from the Global South, IMO, Thinking Machines (which makes Inkling) is one of the most geopolitically important labs in the United States right now, just behind the big 3: OpenAI, Anthropic, and GDM. The reason is that, for over a year since gpt-oss-120b's release, US AI progress has not been correlated with global benefits in independent AI research, namely, that they do not advance open-source models. For this reason, behaviors that were obviously unethical and undesirable (distillation, Chinese AI advancement) were justified by many around the world as acceptable or even noble in some cases, as they're the only supplier of open-source models that are so vital to any sort of AI research.

If Inkling continues its trajectory of rapid growth (and if the open-source ecosystem in America and Europe grows enough to rival China's), I'd expect global sympathy for Chinese methods to drop reasonably quickly, especially given significant security concerns around Chinese models. Whether or not this is a good thing remains up for debate; on one hand, a larger lead over China (not just in pure capabilities but in demonstrable commercial numbers) could help with pressuring them, and at least many countries would switch to using American open-source models as a template to develop their own sovereign systems, as well as many researchers would switch. On the other hand, it might provoke more aggressive Chinese measures as they feel cornered, and plausibly weaken an international deal. Nonetheless, as the preeminent open-source lab in America, Thinking Machines should be considered a rather important lab.

(This is specifically in response to the release of Inkling 2 Small's weights yesterday, which are estimated in some sources (AA) as nearly GLM-5.3 levels and better than Mistral Large 4. I am still waiting for its ECI numbers.)