- Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling 2 Small, a 594-billion-parameter model it plans to open-weight next week.
- Third-party tester Artificial Analysis says the model would be the highest-scoring open-weight model developed outside China once its weights ship.
- Inkling 2 Small scored 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tied with Gemini 3.8 Flash but well behind Gemini 4 Carbon and Claude Opus 5.5 at 60 and 59.
- Pricing of $0.30 per million input tokens is above the $0.24 median for its class, and Artificial Analysis called the model slow and verbose per task.
What Happened
Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its latest model, Inkling 2 Small, on November 6, 2026. The model is proprietary for now, but the company said it will release its weights next week following a staggered safety-review process, similar to the approach French lab Mistral used for its own open model, Le Chonk.
Why It Matters
Chinese labs, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi and DeepSeek, have led open-weight model leaderboards for roughly the past two years. Artificial Analysis said Thinking Machines’ plan to release Inkling 2 Small’s weights “would make it the highest-scoring open weights model developed outside China based on current rankings,” a shift that could reshape how Western enterprises weigh open-weight AI options against Chinese alternatives.
Technical Details
Inkling 2 Small has 594 billion parameters, accepts image inputs, and outputs text only. It scored 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite benchmark spanning coding, science, and general reasoning. Artificial Analysis called the model “notably slow per task and very verbose” and flagged its $0.30-per-million-input-token price as “somewhat expensive” against a $0.24 median for comparable models.
Who’s Affected
Enterprises evaluating open-weight models for coding and agent workflows gain a new Western-developed option alongside Mistral’s Le Chonk, which Thinking Machines said now keeps pace with OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Terra on coding tasks. The release adds competitive pressure on Chinese open-weight providers that have dominated the category.
What’s Next
Thinking Machines has not set an exact release date beyond “next week” for Inkling 2 Small’s weights. The staggered release process includes further testing with cybersecurity teams and safety reviewers before the weights become publicly available.
ZDNET, November 6, 2026.
