Thinking Machines debuts Inkling 2 Small and promises weights next week
The model has 594bn parameters, 17bn of them active, and scores 31 on the Artificial Analysis index. Weights are due under an Apache 2.0 licence after external safety testing.
Source published · In the Daily Brief of 6 November 2026
Filed under Large language models, AI industry
Inkling 2 Small is a mixture-of-experts model with image input, trained with reinforcement learning on hundreds of thousands of long-horizon coding tasks. For now it is available only through Tinker, the company’s fine-tuning service, with closed weights. Thinking Machines Lab says it intends to release the full weights under an Apache 2.0 licence next week, once external safety testing and red-teaming are complete.
The company’s own benchmark tables show a mixed picture. On FrontierCode v2.0 it scores 25.4%, behind DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash at 28.5%. On a kernel optimisation task set of 69 problems it solves a mean of 54.25, against 63 for GPT-6 Astra. Separately, Business Insider reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the company is raising $5bn at a $40bn pre-money valuation in a round led by Accel.