Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small tops western open-weight models

thinking machines, a startup from former openai cto mira murati, has unveiled inkling 2 small, its second model generation with 594 billion parameters and 17 billion active at any time. it scores 31 on artificial analysis intelligence index, outperforming its predecessor and google's gemini 3.8 flash, with significant gains in agentic tasks. however, it generates more output tokens and costs six times as much per task. this model is designed for fine-tuning and specialized applications.