Model Drop

Inkling 2 Small

November 5, 2026 4 min read

Thinking Machines released Inkling 2 Small on November 5, 2026, and it scores 30.6 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index, up from 12.5 for July's Inkling and two points behind DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, which still beats it on most of the coding and office tests below.

Model: Inkling 2 Small (thinkingmachines/Inkling-2-Small)
Maker: Thinking Machines
Ship date: November 5, 2026
Pricing: $0.30 / $1 per M tokens on Tinker
Context: 1M tokens (64K or 256K on Tinker)
Weights: Open (Apache 2.0, weights due next week)
Where you can use it:
- Tinker Playground for chat
- Tinker for fine-tuning and sampling
When to reach for it:
- A strong open base to fine-tune
- Skip it for long terminal agent runs
How it compares:
- Just behind DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
- Ahead of GLM-5.3-Flash and Muse Spark Open
What makes it different:
- Pretrained natively in 4-bit NVFP4
- Sees images and checks its own visual work
Early reactions: Glad for a US open model, unsold on price.
Read more: Introducing Inkling 2 Small and the model card

The benchmarks

Thinking Machines ran Inkling 2 Small at xhigh effort (0.99), temperature 1.0, with a 1M-token trajectory limit, against four open-weight models of similar size: GLM-5.3-Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, Muse Spark Open and Kimi K3. Most of its rows are scores reported by outside evaluators (Artificial Analysis, Scale AI, Datacurve), not its own runs. The Terminal-Bench 4.0 row is Artificial Analysis's standard harness and the AutomationBench row matches Artificial Analysis's run, so both are labelled that way here. Blank cells in its table are left out, and so are a few rival cells where its table differs from the number already on the Handy AI board (Kimi K3 on DeepSWE and GDPval-AA).

Thinking Machines' numbers

FrontierCode 2.0 (hard coding problems): 25.4%. +11.2 over GLM-5.3-Flash (14.2%), −3.1 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (28.5%), +17.8 over Muse Spark Open (7.6%), +8.1 over Kimi K3 (17.3%).
DeepSWE v1.1 (fixing real repositories): 72.1%. +8.7 over GLM-5.3-Flash (63.4%), −4.9 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (77%), +12.1 over Muse Spark Open (60%).
SWE-bench Pro v2 Hard (the hardest real GitHub issues): 86.3%. +3.9 over Muse Spark Open (82.4%), −1.9 under Kimi K3 (88.2%).
Terminal-Bench 4.0 (standard harness, multi-hour terminal work): 13.1%. −19.7 under GLM-5.3-Flash (32.8%), −20.7 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (33.8%), +5.0 over Muse Spark Open (8.1%), +0.5 over Kimi K3 (12.6%).
MCP Atlas (tool use over MCP, full set): 85.4%. −3.8 under Muse Spark Open (89.2%), +3.1 over Kimi K3 (82.3%).
AutomationBench-AA (business automations): 45.6%. −14.8 under GLM-5.3-Flash (60.4%), −21.0 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (66.6%), −4.1 under Muse Spark Open (49.7%), −12.7 under Kimi K3 (58.3%).
AA-Briefcase v1.1 (end-to-end office work): 1527. +76 over GLM-5.3-Flash (1451), −43 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (1570), +248 over Muse Spark Open (1279), +30 over Kimi K3 (1497).
GDPval-AA (professional deliverables): 1630. −19 under GLM-5.3-Flash (1649), −116 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (1746), +229 over Muse Spark Open (1401).
JobBench (real job tasks): 70.5%. +9.8 over GLM-5.3-Flash (60.7%), +8.7 over Muse Spark Open (61.8%), +16.2 over Kimi K3 (54.3%).
GDP.pdf (reading business PDFs): 25.2%. +9.8 over GLM-5.3-Flash (15.4%), +8.0 over DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (17.2%), +6.6 over Muse Spark Open (18.6%), +3.2 over Kimi K3 (22%).
MMMU-Pro (college-level image questions): 81.6%. +2.6 over GLM-5.3-Flash (79%), +1.0 over DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (80.6%), +0.7 over Muse Spark Open (80.9%), +1.1 over Kimi K3 (80.5%).
BabyVision (with tools) (basic visual puzzles, with Python): 93.7%. +11.1 over GLM-5.3-Flash (82.6%), +1.2 over DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (92.5%), +13.5 over Muse Spark Open (80.2%), +8.0 over Kimi K3 (85.7%).
CritPt v2 Hard (research physics problems): 35%. +10.5 over GLM-5.3-Flash (24.5%), +10.0 over DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (25%), +5.5 over Muse Spark Open (29.5%), −5.5 under Kimi K3 (40.5%).
AA-LCR (reasoning over long documents): 83.3%. +3.3 over GLM-5.3-Flash (80%), +5.0 over Muse Spark Open (78.3%), −5.4 under Kimi K3 (88.7%).

Independent numbers

Both checked on the evaluators' own pages on November 6.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 (overall smarts): 30.6. −2.0 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (32.6), −1.1 under GLM-5.3 (31.7), +1.5 over MiniMax M3.1 Flash (29.1), +5.7 over Muse Spark Open (24.9), +18.1 over Inkling (12.5).
Vals Index v2.2 (mixed real-world tasks): 56.08%. −5.18 under DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (61.26%), −3.65 under GLM-5.3 (59.73%), +2.30 over MiniMax M3.1 Flash (53.78%), +3.13 over Kimi K3 (52.95%), +7.51 over Muse Spark Open (48.57%), +27.12 over Inkling (28.96%).

First impressions

The model is a day old and only on Tinker, so most of the early talk is from the Hacker News launch thread (99 points).

The positives

a11r on Hacker News liked that the tables don't flatter the model.

Very refreshing to see benchmarks where the reporting team is not the clear winner. (comment)

That holds up: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 wins most of the coding rows above, and Thinking Machines printed them anyway.

itkovian_ on Hacker News pointed at the training detail.

The most important thing here is training was entirely nvfp4 - this is best model by far that has ever been trained in that precision and explains why they were able to do it so fast (comment)

Thinking Machines says pretraining ran natively in NVFP4 and the main RL run took 9 days on 2,048 GPUs, so the speed part checks out.

The negatives

lifeisloving on Hacker News doesn't see a reason to switch from DeepSeek.

If you cant beat Deepseek on price im not using it. (comment)

Bolwin added that Artificial Analysis lists it at $0.30 in and $1 out, and put its cost per task at about double DeepSeek's. For a model that also scores a bit lower, that's the hard sell.

markasoftware on Hacker News was blunter.

Not beating dsv4.1 at all (comment)

The weights also aren't out yet. Thinking Machines says next week, after outside safety testing, so for now it's an open model you can only run on Tinker.