Thinking Machines Releases Inkling 2 Small

Thinking Machines is the startup founded by Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer. The company has released a new model called Inkling 2 Small. Thinking Machines calls it the strongest open-weight model built outside China. That means its internal settings are meant to be published for everyone, sooner or later. The model has 594 billion parameters, which are the settings a model picks up during training. But only 17 billion of them activate for any given task. This setup is called mixture-of-experts. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, an independent benchmark of model capability, it scored 31 points, up from 13 for the previous version. The weights are not public yet. Right now the model is only available through Thinking Machines' own platform, Tinker. The company plans to release the weights under the Apache 2.0 license, a permissive open-source license, once it finishes its safety checks.

One task through Inkling 2 Small costs $1.18, according to Thinking Machines' own numbers. For comparison, the same task costs $7.77 on Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash and $10.02 on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5. That gap matters for agentic tasks, where the AI works through many steps on its own, because every step adds to the bill. Still, the weights are closed for now. And even once they are released, 594 billion parameters is too large to run on a home computer. The comparison so far is only against Gemini and Sonnet, not against Anthropic's top models, Opus and Fable, which this benchmark does not include.