Inkling 2 Small is a big AI model from Thinking Machines Lab that reads text and images and answers in text. It was released on 5 November 2026.
In plain words
It is a mixture-of-experts model: it has 594 billion parameters, but only 17 billion of them are active. It can take in up to 1 million tokens of context. At launch it is offered on Tinker, the lab's platform for fine-tuning and running models, with its weights kept closed. On release day the lab said it intended to publish the full weights under an Apache 2.0 licence the following week, once outside safety testing and red-teaming were done.
A quick example
Imagine a developer building a helper that answers questions about photos of receipts. They fine-tune the model on Tinker with their own examples, then use the tuned model to read new receipts.
Where you'll meet it
- Coding assistants and other agents that use tools.
- Apps that need to understand images as well as text.
Related
Sources
- DocsIntroducing Inkling 2 Small, Thinking Machines Lab · read 6 Nov 2026
- DocsInkling 2 Small model card, Thinking Machines Lab · read 12 Nov 2026
- DocsTinker, Thinking Machines Lab docs · read 6 Nov 2026
Checked by WhatIsAI against the sources above · 12 Nov 2026. Spotted an error? Report it.