Thinking Machines releases Inkling 2 Small, scores 31 on AI Index

The lab's second-generation model launches with closed weights on Tinker, with an Apache 2.0 release planned after external safety testing Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling 2 Small, the newest member of its model family. It scored 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0). The company calls itself committed to open weights. For now, though, the model ships as a proprietary product, with the weights promised later. The launch landed on November 5, 2026. It is the lab’s second-generation release, arriving less than four months after the original Inkling lineup debuted in July. What’s under the hood Inkling 2 Small uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. It has 594 billion total parameters, but only 17 billion are active at any given time. Each request gets routed to a small subset of the model’s internal “experts.” The result is a model that holds a lot of knowledge but only spends a fraction of its compute on any single query. Usage through Thinking Machines’ Tinker platform costs $0.30 per 1 million input tokens and $1.00 per 1 million output tokens. The research findings describe that pricing as competitive with peers. The model accepts image inputs and supp...