Thinking Machines Releases Inkling 2 Small: A 594B MoE Model With Only 17B Active Parameters

Thinking Machines has released Inkling 2 Small, a 594-billion parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates only 17 billion parameters per forward pass, targeting the efficiency-performance frontier for open-weight models. The sparse activation design allows the model to deliver strong reasoning and instruction-following quality while keeping inference compute comparable to much smaller dense models. This positions Inkling 2 Small as a compelling option for teams that want large-model capability without the serving cost of a fully dense frontier model. Developers can evaluate the model for tasks requiring strong generalization — such as coding, math, and multi-step reasoning — at a fraction of the typical compute budget. The release adds meaningful competition in the growing MoE open-weight space alongside models like Mixtral and DeepSeek.