Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small tops Western open-weight rankings

ZDNet reports that Inkling 2 Small from Thinking Machines Lab now leads independent rankings of open-weight models from Western labs. The ranking covers models from US and European developers, excluding Chinese labs. The launch comes days after Mistral open-sourced Large 4, nicknamed 'Le Chonk,' which drew praise for its coding performance.

Thinking Machines, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has built its reputation on research tooling and fine-tuning infrastructure. Releasing a strong open model extends that position into a crowded area of the market. The 'Small' label indicates a model sized for practical deployment rather than a frontier-scale release, which is where most open-weight adoption actually happens.

The broader context is a renewed Western push in open weights. Chinese labs, including Qwen, DeepSeek, Moonshot's Kimi and others, have dominated open leaderboards for more than a year. Alibaba is teasing Qwen 4, and a DeepSeek open model nearly matched OpenAI's cyber model at about $3 per run. On r/LocalLLaMA, NousResearch's Arete-27B, a Qwen fine-tune, drew 270 upvotes, a reminder that many Western open projects still build on Chinese base models.

Caveats: 'top Western open model' is a narrow category, and the rankings come from third-party testers rather than standardized evaluations. Watch for license terms, parameter details and comparisons against Qwen 4 if it ships soon.