Thinking Machines has announced the release of its new open-weight model, Inkling-Small, which boasts 276 billion total parameters and 12 billion active parameters. This model is now available on platforms such as Huggingface and Tinker Playground, where users can engage with it through multimodal chatting in text, image, and audio formats. The company states that Inkling-Small provides performance comparable to its larger predecessor, Inkling, at a fraction of the size, reflecting a trend among US AI labs to offer open-weight models as competitive alternatives in the global AI landscape.

Inkling-Small: Inkling-Small is an open-weights multimodal model developed by Thinking Machines Lab as a more efficient variant in its Inkling family. It supports reasoning over text, images, and audio inputs while enabling variable thinking effort for different performance needs. The model is now available for fine-tuning on Tinker and chat interactions on Tinker Playground and Hugging Face.
Thinky Machines: Thinky Machines is the X account @thinkymachines associated with Thinking Machines Lab, used for announcing model releases and developer tools. The account shared details about the Inkling-Small launch, highlighting its efficiency and accessibility features.
Thinking Machines: Thinking Machines Lab is an artificial intelligence research and product company focused on developing customizable and capable AI systems for broader human-AI collaboration. The lab recently announced the release of Inkling-Small, its new open-weights model, making the full weights available for public use. It operates the Tinker platform to support model fine-tuning and interaction.

Platform: Tinker Playground supports multimodal chatting with models like Inkling-Small in text, image, and audio formats.
Ecosystem: Tinker provides a training API for developers to fine-tune supported models including those from Thinking Machines Lab.
Open Weights: US AI labs are releasing open-weights models as competitive alternatives in the global landscape.