# Thinking Machines Puts Inkling 2 Small on Tinker as a 594B MoE and Says Apache Weights Come After Safety Tests

Times of AI Desk · 2026-11-07 · Models

[https://timesof.ai/2026/11/thinking-machines-inkling-2-small-tinker](https://timesof.ai/2026/11/thinking-machines-inkling-2-small-tinker)

> Thinking Machines Lab on November 5 introduced Inkling 2 Small, a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active, supporting image inputs and variable effort. It is available now on Tinker with closed weights for inference and fine-tuning. The lab says it intends to release the full weights under an Apache 2.0 license next week after external safety testing and red-teaming. It claims an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of 31; its own comparison table lists AA Index v5.0 at 30.6. Those scores are lab-reported.

Thinking Machines is again trying to walk the path from a closed fine-tuning API to downloadable weights — this time at a larger MoE and with an explicit safety gate in between. On **November 5** the lab introduced **Inkling 2 Small**, a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with **594 billion** total parameters and **17 billion** active, image inputs and variable effort. That is a jump from [Inkling-Small, the 276 billion / 12 billion-active open MoE it released in July](https://timesof.ai/2026/07/thinking-machines-inkling-small), and a different shape from the [original 975 billion / 41 billion-active Inkling](https://timesof.ai/2026/07/thinking-machines-inkling-open-weights).

The new model is available now on **Tinker** for inference and fine-tuning, with closed weights. Thinking Machines says it intends to make the full weights available under an **Apache 2.0** license next week, after external safety testing and red-teaming, following what it calls a safe path to open weights. Checkpoints will be downloadable when those weights are released, the post says.

## What the lab claims

Thinking Machines says Inkling 2 Small "far surpasses" its previous models on the **Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index**, citing a score of **31**. Its own comparison table lists **AA Index v5.0 at 30.6**. Evaluations in the post were run at effort 0.99 ("xhigh") and temperature 1.0, with a **1 million-token** maximum trajectory limit, up from the 256,000-token limit used for Inkling Small. We have not re-run those evaluations.

On the training side, the lab says the first pre-training phase covered **8.4 trillion** tokens and ran for 68 hours on NVIDIA **GB300 NVL72** racks, natively in **NVFP4**. A later joint reinforcement-learning run lasted **1,075** steps and more than **17 million** rollouts over **nine days** on **2,048** GPUs, which the lab contrasts with separate reasoning and agentic RL runs on the previous Inkling. It describes a vision encoder of **292 million** parameters based on Perception Encoder, and says the model does not support audio.

Safety numbers in the post are the lab's. It says Inkling 2 Small's chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear knowledge and capability scores sit below the open-weight frontier, and that a helpful-only variant did not significantly advance that frontier on the dimensions it measured. We are not reproducing evaluation methods or assistance detail.

## Limits

- Intelligence-index and benchmark figures are Thinking Machines' citations of third-party boards or its own tables; we have not independently reproduced them.
- The prose claim of an AA Index score of 31 does not match the 30.6 listed in the lab's AA Index v5.0 table.
- Apache 2.0 weights are an intention timed to "next week" after safety testing, not a release that has already happened.
- CBRN and cyber comparisons are the vendor's; they are not an independent safety board result.
- Pricing, rate limits and Tinker capacity terms are not specified in the announcement we read.

## Sources

- [Thinking Machines Lab: Introducing Inkling 2 Small (November 5, 2026)](https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2-small/)