# Inkling 2 Small

> Inkling 2 Small is Thinking Machines Lab's second-generation open-weights foundation model: a 594B-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts transformer (17B active) with a 1M-token context window, variable reasoning effort, and tool use — aimed at agentic coding, vision, and knowledge work. It accepts text and image inputs and outputs text. Served today only on Tinker (Thinking Machines' own platform) with weights closed under Tinker Terms of Use; an Apache 2.0 weight release is committed for next week after safety testing.

**ID**: `thinkingmachines/inkling-2-small`  
**Creator**: thinkingmachines  
**Category**: text  
**Context**: 262K tokens  
**Pricing**: $0.30 / $1.00 per 1M · billed by your provider (BYOK)  
**Released**: 2026-11-05  
**Web page**: https://anyrouter.dev/model/thinkingmachines/inkling-2-small

**Input modalities**: text, image  
**Output modalities**: text  

**Capabilities**: chat, streaming, reasoning, vision, function-calling

## Usage

**Endpoint**: `POST https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/chat/completions`

```bash
curl https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "model": "thinkingmachines/inkling-2-small",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Say hi in 3 words."
    }
  ]
}'
```

## Providers

| Provider | Input | Output |
| --- | --- | --- |
| thinkingmachines-byok | $0.30/M (list) | $1.00/M (list) |
| thinkingmachines-byok | $0.30/M (list) | $1.00/M (list) |

BYOK routes are billed by your own provider key — AnyRouter charges $0. Rates marked (list) are the provider's published list price.

## Model card

- Architecture: mixture of experts [1,2]
- Total parameters: 594B [1,2]
- Active parameters: 17B [1,2]
- Native context: 1048576 tokens [2]
- License: Tinker Terms of Use [2]

### Strengths [1]

- Far surpasses previous Inkling generations on a leading external intelligence index score (31), with large gains in agentic coding, vision, knowledge work, and reasoning.
- Long-horizon autonomous work is its biggest jump: vision and agentic capabilities enable iterative website, game, and 3D-design building with visual feedback.
- Unified large-scale RL across pre-training and post-training improvements at every stage of training.

### Known limits [1]

- Less optimized for the chat experience: worse organization and presentation of content, overuse of slashes, and overreaction to mental health and other safety-related queries.
- Does not always choose the best tools for the job, especially in codebases with a large number of skills.
- Does not support audio input; image input only (40px to 4096px dimension range).

### Use cases [1,2]

- Agentic coding and long-horizon autonomous software work, tested on OpenCode under the Fledge-Alpha alias.
- Iterative UI/game/3D prototyping with visual feedback (e.g. procedural city simulators).
- General-purpose conversational use, instruction following, and retrieval-augmented generation.

### API notes [4,1,2]

- First-party serving via Tinker with an OpenAI-compatible /chat/completions endpoint (https://tinker.thinkingmachines.dev/services/tinker-prod/oai/api/v1).
- Variable reasoning effort and tool use; image inputs projected alongside text.
- No audio input.

### Links

- announcement: https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2-small/
- model card: https://thinkingmachines.ai/model-card/inkling-2-small/
- Previous version: https://anyrouter.dev/model/thinkingmachines/inkling-small

### Sources

1. [Introducing Inkling 2 Small - Thinking Machines Lab](https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2-small/) (accessed 2026-11-07)
2. [Inkling 2 Small Model Card - Thinking Machines Lab](https://thinkingmachines.ai/model-card/inkling-2-small/) (accessed 2026-11-07)
3. [Tinker Docs — Models & Pricing](https://tinker-docs.thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/models/models_and_pricing/) (accessed 2026-11-07)
4. [Tinker Docs — OpenAI API Compatible Inference](https://tinker-docs.thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/compatible-apis/openai/) (accessed 2026-11-07)

## Source

- Upstream docs: https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2-small/