Thinking Machines Inkling 975B model, Airbus quits AWS

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Saturday July twenty-fifth, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Mira Murati's new AI startup drops a massive open model called Inkling; Airbus pulls nine hundred critical apps out of Amazon's cloud for a French alternative; South Korea signs historic chip deals in San Francisco; Taiwan steers its robotics industry away from military uses toward healthcare and factories; and to close out, two things you can actually try today, the open-source screen recorder OBS Studio, and a smart travel companion called PolarSteps. Let's start with Inkling.

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines launches Inkling, a nine hundred seventy-five billion parameter open-weight AI model.

Samantha: The biggest tech story today comes from Thinking Machines, the AI startup founded by Mira Murati, who used to run technology at OpenAI. They've just launched a model called Inkling, and the number that jumps out is nine hundred seventy-five billion parameters. That makes it one of the largest openly available AI models in existence. Crucially, this is what's called open-weight, which means anyone can download it, run it on their own hardware, and adapt it for their own purposes. That's a very different philosophy from the closed systems most people know, like the ones behind ChatGPT or Google's Gemini.

Bob: And the timing is loaded. We're in the middle of what many observers are calling a full-blown AI price war between the big American labs, and now a former OpenAI leader turns around and hands out a model of this scale for free. Inkling is available through developer platforms, including one called Tinker. For companies, this changes the math. If you're a European bank, a hospital, a research lab, you no longer have to send your sensitive data to a US cloud to get top-tier AI performance. You can, in principle, run this on your own servers.

Samantha: That's exactly where the European angle gets interesting. Digital sovereignty has become a genuine boardroom concern here, not just a talking point. A model like Inkling gives European developers a serious alternative to the closed American systems, without having to build one from scratch. Universities in France and Germany, national AI programmes in the Netherlands and Spain, they now have a base to build on that they can fully inspect and control.

Bob: There are caveats though. Running a model this large is not cheap. You need powerful hardware, and that hardware still mostly comes from Nvidia in the United States. So openness at the software layer does not automatically translate into full independence. Still, the fact that a top-tier former OpenAI figure is deliberately choosing the open route matters. It signals that the closed-model strategy is no longer the only credible path, and it puts real competitive pressure on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to justify why their systems stay locked down.

Airbus pulls nine hundred critical applications out of Amazon Web Services and moves them to a French cloud provider.

Samantha: Aerospace giant Airbus is doing something that would have been unthinkable five years ago. It's reportedly moving nine hundred of its critical business applications off Amazon Web Services, the biggest cloud provider in the world, and onto a French cloud provider instead. This is not a small housekeeping change. These are applications that keep one of Europe's flagship industrial companies running day to day.

Bob: The driver is data sovereignty. European companies have grown increasingly nervous about the fact that when your data sits on servers run by an American company, US law can, under certain conditions, compel that company to hand it over. For a defence-adjacent business like Airbus, that concern is not theoretical. It's an engineering and legal risk that shows up on the board's agenda. So they've decided the cost and complexity of migrating nine hundred apps is worth paying to keep the data under European jurisdiction.

Samantha: And this is the pattern to watch. Airbus is not alone. Several European governments have been quietly pressing their agencies to reduce dependence on the three big American clouds, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. French providers like OVHcloud have been positioning themselves for exactly this moment. What was once a fringe political argument, that Europe needs its own cloud infrastructure, is turning into concrete procurement decisions at some of the continent's largest firms.

Bob: For European listeners, this matters beyond the boardroom. If more big companies follow Airbus, European cloud providers get the scale they need to compete on price and features with the American giants. That could eventually change what smaller businesses and even public services pay for cloud services. The flip side, of course, is disruption. Migrating nine hundred applications is a multi-year project with real risk of downtime, and the European alternatives still have gaps in some advanced services, particularly around AI infrastructure.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

South Korea signs historic memory chip supply deals with US tech giants during a San Francisco push to become a global AI hub.

Bob: South Korea is making a very public bet that it wants to be the world's AI production platform. President Lee Jae Myung is in San Francisco this week, and during that visit, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are preparing to announce what are being called historic memory chip supply agreements with major US technology firms. These are the deals that determine who gets to build the next generation of AI systems, and at what cost.

Samantha: To understand why this matters, you have to know that modern AI systems are extraordinarily hungry for a specific kind of memory chip called high-bandwidth memory. Samsung and SK Hynix together dominate that market. So when the South Korean president stands next to executives from American tech firms and blesses these supply agreements, he's essentially locking in South Korea's position at the heart of the global AI supply chain for years to come.

Bob: And it's a deliberate strategic pivot. President Lee is positioning South Korea not just as a manufacturer, but as what he calls a global AI testbed. That means encouraging foreign AI companies to deploy and test their systems in Korea, using Korean infrastructure and Korean chips. It's an attempt to move up the value chain from being a component supplier to being a full participant in the AI economy.

Samantha: For Europe, the implication is mixed. On one hand, a more diversified and larger global supply of AI memory chips could ease some of the bottlenecks that European data centres have been facing. Building an AI facility in Frankfurt or Amsterdam right now means waiting in a long queue for hardware. More supply, more competition, potentially better prices. On the other hand, it also underlines just how thin Europe's own presence is in this critical piece of the technology stack. The continent that invented modern lithography through ASML still buys almost all its finished AI memory from Asia.

Taiwan steers its robotics industry towards healthcare and factories, deliberately avoiding humanoid military robots.

Bob: Taiwan is making a striking policy choice about robotics. Science and Technology Minister Wu Cheng-wen has said the country will focus its robotics industry on artificial intelligence and social needs, rather than military applications. That's a pointed contrast to what several other countries, including the United States and China, are doing with humanoid robots. Taiwan is essentially saying, we will build robots for hospitals, factory floors, and elderly care, not for the battlefield.

Samantha: This is more than a values statement. It's an industrial strategy. Taiwan already dominates advanced chip manufacturing through TSMC, and it has a strong precision engineering base. By concentrating its robotics push on healthcare, manufacturing assistance, and everyday services, Taiwan is aiming for markets that are, frankly, much larger and more sustainable than defence contracts. Ageing populations across Asia and Europe need care robots. Factories everywhere need cobots that work alongside humans. That's where the volume is.

Bob: And the European connection here is quite natural. Europe has similar demographic pressures, particularly in Germany, Italy and Japan-adjacent aging profiles across the south. It also has a strong tradition of what's often called ethical AI, the idea that these systems should be built with human welfare front and centre. A Taiwanese robotics sector that shares those goals is a natural partner for European hospitals, universities and industrial firms.

Samantha: There's a subtler point too. By publicly ruling out military humanoid robots, Taiwan is trying to differentiate itself from the increasingly militarised robotics narrative coming out of some other capitals. That could make Taiwanese robots easier to sell into European markets, where regulators and buyers are more cautious about dual-use technology. It's a form of soft power expressed through industrial policy. Whether it holds up under geopolitical pressure is another question, but for now the direction is clear.

OBS Studio is the free open-source tool that turns any laptop into a full broadcasting studio for recording and streaming.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today, and the first one is for anyone who has ever wanted to record a video of their screen, run a livestream, or put together a proper video call recording without paying for expensive software. It's called OBS Studio. OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software, and it's completely free, open source, and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It's the tool that a huge number of professional streamers and educators quietly use behind the scenes.

Samantha: What makes OBS interesting is how flexible it is. You can capture your entire screen, or just a specific application window. You can mix in your webcam, add multiple audio sources, switch between different scenes with a click, and record locally or push a livestream to platforms like YouTube or Twitch. Users often describe it as the moment they stopped worrying about how to record things and just started making them.

Bob: For teachers, small business owners, podcasters who want to add video, or anyone building online courses in Europe, this is a genuinely powerful bit of software that costs nothing and doesn't send your recordings off to a cloud unless you explicitly choose to. Everything stays on your own machine. You download it from obsproject dot com, and there's no account required. Reviewers consistently point out that the learning curve is real, the interface has a lot of buttons, but there are excellent free tutorials that walk you through your first recording in about fifteen minutes.

Samantha: And because it's open source, it's been audited by the community for years, which is reassuring if you plan to use it for anything sensitive, like recorded internal training sessions. It works well on modest hardware too. You don't need the latest gaming laptop. A regular office machine from the last few years handles it comfortably for most use cases.

PolarSteps is the free travel app that quietly maps your entire trip and turns it into a shareable story.

Bob: The second one, and this is timely because we're in the middle of summer holidays across Europe, is a travel app called PolarSteps. It's Dutch, based in Amsterdam, and it does one thing very well. It automatically tracks where you go on a trip and turns it into a beautiful visual map and diary that you can share with friends and family, or just keep for yourself.

Samantha: The way it works is refreshingly simple. You start a trip in the app when you leave home, and then you basically forget about it. The app quietly logs your route in the background, marking each city or place you pass through. When you take photos, you can attach them to specific stops. When you get home, or even while you're still travelling, you have this rich, illustrated story of your journey that you can share with a link. No social media account required, no algorithm deciding who sees what.

Bob: The privacy angle is worth noting. PolarSteps only shares your trip with people you explicitly invite. It's not a public feed by default. Users often mention that it drains far less battery than they expect, because it takes location samples at intervals rather than constantly. The app is free for the core features. There's also an optional paid tier that lets you order a printed hardcover travel book at the end of your trip, which has become quite popular as a gift for grandparents.

Samantha: It's available on both iPhone and Android, works across Europe without any friction, and is one of the few genuinely European consumer apps in the travel space that has held its own against the American giants. Today we covered: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines launching the massive open-weight Inkling AI model; Airbus moving nine hundred critical apps from Amazon Web Services to a French cloud; South Korea's historic AI chip deals in San Francisco; Taiwan choosing healthcare and factories over military robots; and two things to try yourself, the free broadcasting tool OBS Studio, and the Dutch travel app PolarSteps.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.