Seems like this is particularly good at instruction following, but not as strong at coding as others. It's always great to get more diversity of open weight models though! I'll need to test this out to see what its "personality" is like.
too bad we'll never know how good it is, since they used a radar plot to show its benchmark scores!
It's nice to see a strong long context open weights model that is multi-modal.
There are many applications that will benefit from the strength in audio here and until z.ai and co work in visual this could be very strong for general agentic applications, though I see there's a bit of weakness in the benches for areas that might make that less true.
Like all models need to slap it in your harness and do proper evals on the tasks you care about.
[delayed]
America needs its own DeepSeek or Z.ai, a lot of people (myself included) root for open chinese models to win because they have no other choice.
Thinking Machines might be it.
It could be but there are a host of companies going after open weights models: Arcee, Reflection, Llama (TBD on Meta's focus on closed-source versus open-source), etc.
That said, the fine-tuning API + open weight model at least is a semblance of a viable business that could work so I will be curious about it. I'm not sure the synergy is fully there (why is someone with an open weights model privelaged to fine-tune it better if it's just QLora or Lora) but let's see!
Its not as good as GLM 5.2 for agentic workflows while also being bigger. Competition is going to be ruthless because the super low cost to switching.
There is also AllenAi in the US, but they have yet to produce a model at this scale. Thankfully, new contenders can come out of nowhere and do well, as long as they can produce a competitive model.
What are the different business models for open-weight AI companies?
Just serving the model over API seems like a natural fit and is what many of them are doing. So simply being the cloud provider for your own open weight model can be a source of revenue
For the most part it’s better than Nemotron, worse than GLM. This makes it the best American open weights model from what I can tell?
It's nearly double the size of Nemotron 3 Ultra, so I'd expect it to be considerably better, although the active parameter count seems to be a touch lower at 41B vs 55B
Looks like it can be tried at https://tinker.thinkingmachines.ai/playground
Do they have an api to try the model in real envs?
The Artifical Analysis has a link on their homepage but it 404's :/
They also indicate they have a 276B A12B version, but it doesn't seem the weights are available. This might actually be able to fit in 128GB when quantized to 2 bits or so which makes it interesting.
They mention in the announcement link https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/ that they are still testing Inkling-Small and it will also still be multimodal. This makes it super interesting as a Deepseek V4 Flash replacement (and would be interesting with DwarfStar / ds4 if it gets supported).
It looks like HuggingFace shows Apache-2.0 but they have AUP. How does it work together?
Happy to see an open weight model ! This has all the right ingredients for success.
I never thought i'd see the day they released a model, rather than a blog post. The Figure 3 demo being a screencap of chrome in localhost made me feel better about myself. Jokes aside, best western open weights model- very cool.
They are one of the few labs (perhaps even the only one at this level) that are doing something both unique and useful, rather than simply imitating what the others are doing: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
If it's ~30% bigger and not as good as GLM 5.2, why would I tinker with this model?
Maybe for the multi modal?
> If it's ~30% bigger and not as good as GLM 5.2, why would I tinker with this model?
The benchmarks never tell the full story. Some of the open weights models have been benchmaxxed for a while. Their utility on real work can be different than the benchmark number.
The multimodal input is also a big deal. Having vision input is really helpful for a lot of tasks.
I second that. Gemini 3.5 Flash rocks the benchmark charts but is terrible as an agent. Horrible instruction adherence and makes WAY too many tool calls
which cheap models have you found work best as agents?
Then why are they publishing the benchmarks which makes them look worse than GLM 5.2?
being close is still impressive, especially for their first (released) model
gives me hope that the training moat is even smaller than we thought
> Maybe for the multi modal?
Yeah
There's also an Inkling-Small that is 276B, 12B active that is much smaller than GLM 5.2 and still multimodal. Not released yet, but in the announcement link they mention that they're testing Inkling-Small & will release as open weight after testing. That one may be interesting as a Deepseek V4 Flash replacement.
If they have a really seamless fine-tuning experience and maybe can help you extract the data you need to FT (which is one of the big challenges in actually getting fine-tuning democratized), maybe you would use it because "Tinker" defaults to it.
The model could also be more flexible for non-coding use-cases (they show the results for reasoning being strong) so maybe the argument is to use it for non-coding use-cases to drive relatively deterministic conclusions for non-coding agents (they have also done some determinism work on kernels, which could be useful in pulling on that thread of deterministic models that are fine-tuned for everything that is not writing code.)
That said, I'm not sure how much all the work they have done actually synergizes or if the market size (at least in the short to medium term) is big enough for a huge outcome from the company's current valuation with those bets as the enterprise agent estate is taking a while to evolve. Hence companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are throwing tons of consulting money at the problem.
Raised 2 billion dollars at a 12 billion valuation and debuts at 41 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, while KIMI and DeepSeek will release Fable-class models this week. What a joke.
Cool, now we just need the GPU that supports it
[dead]
[flagged]