The Blank Slate AI Strategy

What does a bare-bones pickup truck have in common with a state-of-the-art AI lab?

Both share a disruptive idea.

![Slate Auto's Blank Slate electric pickup truck in gray composite](<https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/qauto,fauto/smtoecgiq19tpet3ub71>)

In June, Slate Auto revealed the Blank Slate : a $24,950 electric pickup with hand-crank windows, no stereo, no speakers, no touchscreen, & no paint.1 A blank canvas inviting inspired customization.

A month later, Thinking Machines Lab released a parallel in AI, Inkling : a 975B-parameter model, trained from scratch on 45 trillion tokens, entirely open source.2 If models could be colors, this one would be the gray.

![Spider chart comparing Inkling benchmark performance against Nemotron 3 Ultra, GLM 5.2, GPT 5.6 Sol, & Claude Fable 5 across reasoning, coding, vision, audio, & factuality benchmarks](<https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/qauto,fauto/bmtcwu5gaqestyv9jvw8>)

The company’s spider chart shows it’s a generalist model, good in many domains, a base ready to be customized.

Thinking Machines isn’t giving the model away out of altruism. Inkling launched on Tinker, the company’s fine-tuning platform : the weights are free, but the customization charges rent.

Selling customization is one way to commercialize open-source AI, just as accessories monetize a Slate.

Ship a general-purpose base, & let the customer make it their own.

Models like Inkling are the pickup truck of American AI : general-purpose, rugged, customizable, & the foundation on which US open source AI will be built.

Electrek: Slate Auto’s electric truck starts at $24,950 with 205 miles of range ↩︎

Thinking Machines Lab: Inkling, Our Open-Weights Model ↩︎