Thinking Machines unveils Inkling 2 Small, a 594B-parameter model with Apache 2.0 weights planned
Thinking Machines Lab introduced Inkling 2 Small on November 5, 2026, a Mixture-of-Experts model with 594B total and 17B active parameters, available first on its Tinker platform with closed weights and full weights planned under Apache 2.0 after external safety testing.
What happened
- Inkling 2 Small is the first model of Thinking Machines' second generation: a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 594B total parameters and 17B active, taking text and image input and producing text, with a context window of up to 1M tokens.
- Thinking Machines reports a score of 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, well above its earlier models, with the largest gains in agentic coding, vision, knowledge work and reasoning.
- It launched with closed weights on Tinker, where it can be tried in Tinker Playground and used for fine-tuning and sampling; the company says it intends to release the full weights under Apache 2.0 after external safety testing and red-teaming.
- Supports adjustable reasoning effort; Thinking Machines lists limitations including no audio input, wordy answers and a weaker chat experience.
Why it matters: If the weights ship as planned, teams that fine-tune their own models get a large, permissively licensed option aimed at agentic coding and tool use. Until then it's only reachable through Tinker.
Sources
- Thinking Machines Lab: Introducing Inkling 2 Small thinkingmachines.ai
- Inkling 2 Small model card thinkingmachines.ai
Checked November 8, 2026 against the sources above. Claims about performance or benchmarks are the company's own unless stated otherwise.