
Inkling-Small: Open-weight multimodal model for enterprise AI deployment
Published by AINave Editorial • Reviewed by Ramit
Inkling-Small, a 276-billion-parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model from Thinking Machines, delivers performance close to its larger predecessor Inkling while using roughly one quarter of the total parameters and a fraction of the active parameters per token. Released under Apache 2.0, the model is designed for enterprise self-hosting and custom deployment, with full weights on Hugging Face and fine-tuning via the Tinker API.
What happened
Inkling-Small is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 276 billion total parameters and 12 billion active parameters per token. It uses a 42-layer decoder that routes each token to six of 256 specialized experts. The model accepts text, image, and audio inputs and supports a context window of up to one million tokens.
Thinking Machines released full BF16 and NVFP4 checkpoints on Hugging Face and added fine-tuning support through its Tinker API. At launch, the company offered a limited-time 50% discount on API pricing, bringing rates to $0.58 per million prefill tokens, $1.44 per million sampled tokens, and $1.73 per million training tokens. A 256K-context variant is also available at higher rates.
On benchmarks, Inkling-Small scores 80.2% on SWE-bench Verified compared to Inkling's 77.6%, and 64.7% on Terminal Bench 2.1 compared to 63.8%. It also edges
Sources
- Thinking Machines debuts Inkling Small open source AI model nearing performance of predecessor at about 1/4 size
- Thinking Machines debuts Inkling Small open source AI model...
- Introducing Inkling-Small - Thinking Machines Lab
- Thinking Machines Lab Releases Inkling: An Open-Weights...
- Thinking Machines launches Inkling, a 975B parameter open-source...
- Thinking Machines has released Inkling, the new leading U.S. open...
- Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab Finally Has A Model — And It’s Called Inkling
- Nvidia-backed Thinking Machines releases Inkling AI model
- AI startup Thinking Machines launches an open-weight AI model
- Thinking Machines' first model bets big on customization
- Inkling: Mira Murati’s first AI model scores 97.1% on AIME 2026 benchmark






















