Thinking Machines Lab launches Inkling 2 Small, raises $5B talks

What happened: Thinking Machines Lab launched Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active. The model is available through Tinker, and its weights are closed for now.

The numbers: The company's launch page reports 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, against 30.6 in its table. It scores 86.3% on SWE-Bench Pro v2 (Hard), 72.1% on DeepSWE v1.1, 81.6% on Vibe Code Bench v1.1 and 81.6% on MMMU Pro. Artificial Analysis says it matches Gemini 3.8 Flash (high) on its index.

The details: The model accepts image input and variable effort. It does not support audio.

In their words: Thinking Machines Lab said: "Inkling 2 Small far surpasses our previous models' scores on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 31."

What's next: The company says it intends to release full weights under an Apache 2.0 licence next week, after external safety testing and red-teaming. It gave no date.

The context: The lab raised a $2 billion seed round in July 2025 at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Earlier talks at $50–60 billion collapsed after three co-founders returned to OpenAI. Annual revenue run rate is reported above $100 million.

Funding talks: The Information reports talks to raise $5–6 billion at a pre-money valuation of at least $40 billion, with Accel reportedly leading. Nvidia may supply about half, roughly $2.5–3 billion. Sources differ on whether Nvidia's share is inside or on top of the $5–6 billion. OpenAI has not confirmed these figures, and the round has not closed.