RELEASE · MODELS · #3219
Thinking Machines unveils Inkling 2 Small, a 594B-parameter mixture-of-experts model
Thinking Machines says it has released Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts base model with 594 billion parameters (17 billion active) that accepts text and images and is initially offered via the Tinker platform; the company intends to publish the weights under an Apache 2.0 license after external safety testing. According to Thinking Machines and Artificial Analysis metrics cited by the company, Inkling 2 Small scores 31 on the Artificial Analysis AI Index (an 18-point gain over its predecessor), shows large gains on agentic and coding benchmarks, produces more output tokens and costs more per task, and claims the strongest performance among Western open-weight models.
KEY POINTS
- Thinking Machines says it has released Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts base model with 594 billion parameters (17 billion active) that accepts text and images and is initially offered via the Tinker platform; the company intends to publish the weights under an Apache 2.0 license after external safety testing.
- According to Thinking Machines and Artificial Analysis metrics cited by the company, Inkling 2 Small scores 31 on the Artificial Analysis AI Index (an 18-point gain over its predecessor), shows large gains on agentic and coding benchmarks, produces more output tokens and costs more per task, and claims the strongest performance among Western open-weight models.
- This release is notable because it positions a Western open-weight model with competitive benchmarks and a planned permissive Apache 2.0 weight release, potentially shaping the open-model landscape and enterprise adoption.
WHY IT MATTERS
This release is notable because it positions a Western open-weight model with competitive benchmarks and a planned permissive Apache 2.0 weight release, potentially shaping the open-model landscape and enterprise adoption.
SOURCES & TIMELINE
1Thinking Machines, the startup from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is releasing Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion parameters, 17 billion of which are active at any given time. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Inkling 2 Small scores 31, an 18-point jump over its predecessor and roughly on par with Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash, with especially strong gains in agentic tasks. The i…
Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small swears in its internal chain of thought. Researchers at Vals AI read the model's thinking logs from 2,655 runs across 13 benchmarks and found "fuck" or variations in 50 runs, totaling 316 instances. 241 came from just two runs that spiraled out of control. In one, tasked with calculating an asteroid's trajectory, the model produced a single 500,000-character response, roughly novel-…