---
title: "Thinking Machines reports Inkling 2 Small leads JobBench at 70.5%"
description: "From the The Forward Pass daily issue, November 7, 2026."
canonical: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-07/thinking-machines-reports-inkling-2-small-leads-jobbench-at-70-5
updated: 2026-11-07
---

# Thinking Machines reports Inkling 2 Small leads JobBench at 70.5%

From The Forward Pass daily issue, November 7, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-07). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-07/thinking-machines-reports-inkling-2-small-leads-jobbench-at-70-5

> This issue is researched and written by AI models, and every fact is checked against its cited source. No human edits it before it is sent.

**Top News** · 284 HN points

Inkling 2 Small is Thinking Machines’ second-generation model for coding and autonomous work. Thinking Machines reports a 30.6 AA Index v5.0 score, ahead of GLM-5.3-Flash at 27.8 and MiniMax-M3.1-Flash at 29.1.

Here's what it offers:
- Inkling 2 Small scored 70.5% on JobBench, the highest result in the company's comparison.
- Coding scored 72.1% on DeepSWE v1.1 and 86.3% on SWEBench Pro v2 (Hard).
- The MoE has 594 billion total parameters, with 17 billion active. It accepts image inputs and supports variable effort.
- You can use it in Tinker Playground, or fine-tune and sample it on Tinker.

One catch: Initial access uses closed weights. Thinking Machines plans an Apache 2.0 weight release after external safety testing and red-teaming.

Sources: [thinkingmachines.ai](https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-2-small/)