Inkling 2 Small aims to challenge the open-model leaders

Thinking Machines has introduced Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts AI model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active parameters per response. The company plans to release the model’s weights under an Apache 2.0 license next week, subject to external safety testing and red-teaming.

The model is initially available through Thinking Machines’ Tinker platform and its Playground. It accepts text and image inputs, produces text, and lets users select how much effort it should spend on a task. In its official announcement, Thinking Machines says the model is designed for long-running work such as coding, research, document creation, visual tasks, and tool use.

The company reports strong results in agentic coding, where an AI model works through multi-step tasks using tools and feedback. Inkling 2 Small scored 25.4% on FrontierCode v2.0 and 86.3% on SWEBench Pro v2 Hard, according to the company. It also cites an internal test in which the model autonomously trained a forecasting model over 4.5 hours.

Performance claims and costs

Artificial Analysis says Inkling 2 Small scores 31 on its Intelligence Index, matching Gemini 3.8 Flash at its high setting. The research firm says the planned weights release would make it the highest-ranked open-weights model developed outside China in its current rankings.

However, the model appears to achieve some results by using substantially more output tokens. Artificial Analysis estimates that it generates about 150,000 output tokens per Intelligence Index task, compared with roughly 37,000 for the previous Inkling Small model. The firm puts the cost at $1.18 per task, versus $0.20 for Inkling Small.

Thinking Machines says Inkling 2 Small was trained on more than 8 trillion tokens before later training stages focused on agent trajectories and reinforcement learning. The company also acknowledges limitations: the model can be overly verbose, may choose unsuitable tools in complex codebases, does not support audio, and is less polished for everyday chat use.

Sources

• Introducing Inkling 2 Small – Thinking Machines
• Thinking Machines has released Inkling 2 Small, scoring 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index – their plan to release its weights would make it the highest-scoring open weights model developed outside China based on current rankings – Artificial Analysis