Just two weeks after Thinking Machines released Inkling, its first open source AI language model, the well-funded startup led by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati today introduced Inkling-Small without sacrificing much of any performance — and in fact, the new model surpasses its larger predecessor on several benchmarks.
Inkling Small is a 276-billion-parameter multimodal reasoning model with a permissive Apache 2.0 license that comes within a single point of its larger sibling on the third-party Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, despite the original Inkling being 975 billion parameters (internal model settings). It accepts text, image and audio inputs, produces text, and supports a context window of up to one million tokens.
Inkling Small uses 12 billion active parameters per token, compared with Inkling’s 41 billion active parameters, while preserving much of the flagship’s coding, reasoning and multimodal performance.
For enterprises, the appeal is not simply that Inkling-Small is smaller. It is that developers appear to give up relatively little capability while reducing the model’s compute requirements, inference costs and deployment footprint.
The model remains far too large for a laptop or conventional workstation, but it is materially easier to operate than the 3.5X larger flagship, making it a good fit for enterprises with some — but not a lot — of their own graphics processing units (GPUs).
