Inkling 2 Small

259 points85 comments16 hours ago
segmondy

Ohmygoodness, the results look amazing. I felt so sad for them when their first weights dropped, a lot of other great models came out around then and they didn't get the chance to shine even if for a week or 2. But looking at these results, this is really good stuff and a decent alternative to DSv4.1-F1017. Also the best and most detailed comparison I have seen from a lab across models.

Jackobrien

The best open models today have been “good enough” to do most knowledge work for a few months. This might be the first US one good enough too. That’s a big deal.

Open weight US based Opus 5.5 within 12 months.

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epsteingpt

It's a nice, domestic open weight model.

Without hundreds of millions in 9 days a small team is producing a model that can beat DeepSeek 4.1 and a platform to tune it.

Optimistic for the future.

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itkovian_

The most important thing here is training was entirely nvfp4 - this is best model by far that has ever been trained in that precision and explains why they were able to do it so fast

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a11r

Very refreshing to see benchmarks where the reporting team is not the clear winner. They are claiming to be better than GLM 5.3 flash, which is impressive if it holds up outside of benchmarks.

tcdent

Is it SOTA yet? No. Are the domestic open weights labs demonstrating incredible velocity? Undeniably.

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syntaxing

I can’t seem to find the cost? The craziness of deepseek flash 1017 is how ridiculously cheap it is for how capable it is.

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cauliflower99

As someone who knows nothing about wine except I like drinking it - that wine test is fascinating.

ddxv

This is amazing! Can't wait to trying this out. Also, crazy that I found this on LinkedIn with more upvotes and discussion than the HN thread has.

alexandra_au

Damn their last "Inkling Small" model was only 266B and now this is more than double.

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Neywiny

I feel like this is a dumb question, but why are we spending any effort on wine comparisons? Is there a way to get rid of experts on these to just be ones for code?

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maelito

Looks better than mistral 4 on all benchmarks ?

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rocha_lucas

I couldn't pay attention on the content, i was playing with dots

Tade0

> We even tested Inkling 2 Small against some of our researchers in a wine tasting event. It outperformed them using vision alone, correctly identifying three wines from a single picture in 19 out of 20 trials.

So the legendary skill of Charles Duchemin is now widely available? What a time to be alive.

lostmsu

> Small: 594 billion parameters

cries in GPU racks

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ygouzerh

Interesting, I sent the same wine testing example to Claude Opus 5.5 medium, and it failed, where Inkling 2 Small succeed.

barrenko

They should buy the pleias team and just mog everyone.

AnthonyR

I like the presentation on their website! Super well done

Kuyawa

"Sorry, you have been blocked"

*Shrugs*

DeepSeek would never block me

singpolyma3

So basically comparable to DS4.1? But why bother to make something we already have?

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jazzyjackson

I don’t like it. Poor form to squat on an old companies name like that, one which has a rich legacy in AI. I know the trademark was cancelled so all I can say is I don’t like it.

alfiedotwtf

Looks awesome, but dang a bit too big for my machine.

… I can’t wait for custom resizable models!

FWIW: like the Sims where you have certain levels where you move one up and others non-linearly go down e.g. Speed, Intelligence, Conciseness, determinism, trainability