Thinking Machines releases Inkling 2 Small, a 594B sparse model, with open weights to follow
Thinking Machines Lab launched Inkling 2 Small on 5 November: a 594-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 17 billion active parameters, available through Tinker. Downloadable weights are promised after further safety testing, though reports differ on whether that means days or weeks.
Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling 2 Small, the second generation of its Inkling model family, on 5 November 2026. It is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active per token, accepting text and image input and supporting variable reasoning effort.
The model is available through the company's Tinker platform. It launched as closed-weight, with the lab saying it intends to publish full weights in the coming weeks, pending additional safety testing. Coverage differs on timing, with some outlets pointing to roughly a week.
Thinking Machines reports a score of 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, against 13 for the earlier Inkling Small, and says it is particularly strong in finance and quantitative reasoning. One third-party comparison lists Tinker pricing of $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.00 per million output tokens; that figure has not been checked against the company's own page.
Why it matters
A large model with only 17 billion active parameters points to inference costs far below dense models of similar headline size, which matters for anyone paying per token at scale.
If the weights do arrive under a permissive licence, it adds another capable open option for organisations that need to run models on their own infrastructure.
Indicops view
For Indian enterprises weighing sovereign or on-premise deployment, the open-weight question is the one to watch. Do not plan around promised weights; benchmark the model on your own finance and document workloads through the hosted route first, and revisit hosting once the licence terms are published.
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