Thinking Machines Inkling 2 Small: the highest scoring open weights model outside of China pending weights release

Thinking Machines has released Inkling 2 Small, a proprietary reasoning model scoring 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0.1, with Apache 2.0 weights planned for a later, unconfirmed date. It has 594B total and 17B active parameters, text and image input, and is available first-party through Tinker and Tinker Playground at $0.30/$1.00 per 1M input/output tokens. The model gains 18 points over Inkling Small, matches Gemini 3.8 Flash (high), and costs $1.18 per Intelligence Index task.