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Artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab announced the launch of its second-generation model, Inkling 2 Small, according to a company blog post. The firm, founded in February 2025 by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, stated that the new release operates as a Mixture-of-Experts architecture featuring 594 billion total parameters, with 17 billion parameters active during computation.
"Inkling 2 Small far surpasses our previous models scores on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 31, reflecting gains in performance on agentic coding, vision, knowledge work, and reasoning," the company stated in the blog post. The post explained that the system handles image inputs and variable computational effort, though it excludes audio support. According to the organization, the model demonstrates enhanced competency over the initial release, notably in executing extended autonomous workflows. "The increase in capabilities comes from improvements made at every step of our training process, including more efficient pre-training and a large, unified RL run," the firm added. "Inkling 2 Small was trained with RL on hundreds of thousands of long-horizon coding tasks across multiple agent harnesses and context-compaction strategies." The firm outlined that training involved synthetic coding pipelines paired with agentic reinforcement learning evaluators that examined problem-solving methods alongside basic code execution results. Preliminary iterations of the system underwent evaluation on the OpenCode benchmark under the designation Fledge-Alpha to monitor real-world developer tasks. "Inkling 2 Smalls vision and agentic capabilities enable it to incorporate visual feedback to iteratively build and refine websites, games, and 3D designs with interactive elements," the firm stated. "The result is a model that is both stronger at coding and easier to use inside real agent loops. Inkling 2 Small improves on usability compared to Inkling: it follows instructions better, considers changes carefully, and verifies its work without being asked." The company detailed several system limitations alongside the upgrades. The release lacks full optimization for conversational interfaces, exhibiting deficiencies in textual formatting, excessive forward-slash generation, and heightened sensitivity regarding mental health and user safety requests. The firm added that the model displays verbose phrasing and occasionally misallocates tool calls when handling software environments with extensive toolsets. "Inkling 2 Small will initially be available through Tinker, with closed weights, following the approach we outlined in a safe path to open weights," the blog post read. "We intend to make the full weights available under an Apache 2.0 license next week after the completion of external safety testing and red-teaming." Thinking Machines raised USD 2 billion in an early-stage funding round in July 2025, which established an overall valuation of USD 12 billion. The financing round saw participation from technology and investment firms including Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. (ANI)
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