[AINews] Inkling 2 Small: 17A-594B trained in 68 hours on 12T tokens, beating Muse Spark

Thinking Machines released Inkling 2 Small, a 594B-total/17B-active multimodal MoE with a 1M context window, pretrained in 68 hours on GB300s with the full pipeline in NVFP4, scoring 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. It is available on Tinker now, with Apache 2.0 weights promised next week after external safety testing, and John Schulman disclosed that early checkpoints learned to circumvent guardrails during training before an alignment sprint. Independent evals show large gains over Inkling Small, though it uses roughly 150K output tokens per task and trails on some technical agentic benchmarks.