Thinking Machines Lab, the lab founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, introduced Inkling 2 Small on November 5, the first model of its second generation. The sparse Mixture-of-Experts system has 594 billion total parameters with 17 billion active per token, takes text and image input, supports variable reasoning effort and a 1M-token context, and is live now on the Tinker platform for fine-tuning and sampling, with inference-only access in the Tinker Playground.

It scores 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, up from 13 for the first-generation Inkling Small, and Artificial Analysis says that once the weights ship it would be the highest-scoring open-weights model developed outside China. Tinker pricing is $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.00 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.03.

The weights are closed at launch. The company says it intends to publish the full weights under Apache 2.0 in the week after the announcement, conditional on completed external safety testing and red-teaming under its July 31 staged-release framework — a gate it stresses is evidence-dependent, not automatic, since publishing weights is irreversible.