[AINews] Inkling 2 Small: 17A-594B trained in 68 hours on 12T tokens, beating Muse Spark

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There was a time in the early days of Thinking Machines, post 2025 start and cofounder departures, when their going concern as a neolab was very much in doubt. Those days are clearly behind us, as Tinker (now a year old!) and Interaction Models and Inkling and other high-impact contributions to AI research have converted Thinky’s highly credentialed potential into actual concrete ships that establish that they are now a high-functioning neolab at the US frontier.

Anyway, here’s Inkling 2 Small – pretrained from scratch in less than 3 days on <12T tokens native NVFP4, with single joint run RL, competitive with and often beating same-size Chinese models, with VERY good vision encoder:

People are of course comparing with Western models like Mistral, Reflection and Meta Muse. People are calling it “the smartest western open weight model by a margin”, and while it is certainly competitive in that league, what’s probably the most interesting is the intentional “customizability” of Inkling, which leans into the overall Thinky and Tinker messaging:

Source: Latent Space — Read the full article on the original site ↗