Thinking Machines’ new model takes the lead in western open-weight AI
Source: ZDNet ·
Another competitive model developed outside of China could change the open-weight landscape.
From the source
Thinking Machines Lab, a small AI startup from ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released its latest model, Inkling 2 Small — and according to third-party tester Artificial Analysis, it’s set to give Chinese models a run for their lead. It’s technically proprietary until now, but Thinking Machines said it will release its weights next week. Also: Open weights vs. closed: An AI civil war’s afoot Chinese companies have led the pack on open models over the last few years. Models from DeepSeek and Moonshot regularly top leaderboards and rival the capabilities of much more expensive, closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Since DeepSeek’s R1 performed similarly to OpenAI’s o1 in January 2025, Chinese open models have given investors and high-paying enterprise customers reasons to rethink their expensive contracts with US-based labs. Western labs creating more competitive open models changes the landscape. Thinking Machines’ latest model has 594 billion parameters and supports image inputs…