[AINews] Inkling 2 Small: 17A-594B trained in 68 hours on 12T tokens, beating Muse Spark
Latent Space · 人工智能
Build AI systems with context graphs and agentic memory. Join Andrew Ng and AI engineers at NODES 2026 for 100+ live technical sessions . Free, online, 24 hours. Save your spot ! 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: View post on X ↗ And of course don’t miss John Schulman’s take on the alignment process for scaling model training: View post on X ↗ AI News for 11/04/2026-11/05/2026 is brought to you by our friends at Neo4J, whose talks are doing gangbusters ! Build AI systems with context graphs and agentic memory. Join Andrew Ng and AI engineers at NODES 2026 for 100+ live technical sessions . Free, online, 24 hours. Save your spot ! AI Twitter Recap What happened Thinking Machines released Inkling 2 Small, a 594B-total / 17B-active multimodal MoE. It is available now on Tinker, and Apache 2.0 weights are promised "next week" after external safety testing. Launch: Announced at 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, "a big jump over its predecessor."