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1•11/06/2026, 18:31•2 min read

Thinking Machines releases Inkling 2 Small: a MoE model that competes with larger flagships

Thinking Machines releases Inkling 2 Small: a MoE model that competes with larger flagships - 1
Thinking Machines releases Inkling 2 Small: a MoE model that competes with larger flagships - 2
Executive TL;DR30s read

Thinking Machines introduced Inkling 2 Small, a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with 594B total parameters and 17B active per token. Full weights are promised next week under Apache 2.0.

Thinking Machines has released Inkling 2 Small, a model that, despite its size, is able to compete with much larger flagships.

It is built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and has 594 billion parameters, but only 17 billion are activated when processing each token. In addition, the model can work with images and allows users to adjust the depth of reasoning.

In programming tests, Inkling 2 Small matches many significantly larger models. The most notable result is third place in DesignArena, where it ranked just behind the most powerful closed models.

Full weights are promised to be published next week under the Apache 2.0 license.

Official announcement

Why it matters

Analysis

It shows that MoE can deliver flagship-level performance with lower per-token compute. Apache 2.0 weights could enable broader experimentation and deployment.

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