Thinking Machines Lab ships Inkling 2 Small: 594B MoE, 17B active, score 31 on Artificial Analysis — weights still closed

Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling 2 Small, the first model of its second Inkling generation. The lab’s product page lists it as a sparse mixture-of-experts with 594B total parameters and 17B active, text and image input, and variable reasoning effort. It is available now on the lab’s Tinker platform for inference and fine-tuning; the weights stay closed at launch.

What is new

Relative to the first-generation lineup — Inkling (975B total / 41B active, text + image + audio) and Inkling-Small (276B / 12B active) — Inkling 2 Small is positioned as the lab’s most capable model so far, with a “big jump in agentic coding and vision.” It does not claim audio. Artificial Analysis lists a 1M-token context window.

On Tinker, inference is priced at $0.30 per million input tokens ($0.03 cached) and $1.00 per million output. Training is $1.50/M at 64K context or $3.00/M at a 256K PEFT variant. The Tinker model id is thinkingmachines/Inkling-2-Small.

Independent score

Artificial Analysis scores Inkling 2 Small 31 on its Intelligence Index (v5.0.1), placing it #4 among models AA groups in a comparable price band (that band’s median on the index is 23). AA also notes the model is relatively slow and verbose per index task — about 21 minutes and 154M output tokens across the index suite in their run.

Open weights — announced, not applied

Thinking Machines’ page is explicit:

Inkling 2 Small is closed weight at release. We intend to release the full weights in the coming weeks, pending the results of additional safety testing.

Secondary reports say Apache 2.0 is the intended license once that testing finishes; the primary page does not name a license yet. Until the weights ship, access is proprietary — fine-tune on Tinker, but no downloadable checkpoint.

Reading

A second-generation drop from Thinking Machines matters less as another MoE size card and more as a bet: agentic coding and vision at ~17B active, with a promised open-weight path that has not shipped yet. The score of 31 is independently measured; the “coming weeks” weight release is the checkable open question.