Making AI Headlines · Page 4
Thinking Machines Offers an Open Crown With a Token Meter Attached
· New York time
Thinking Machines, the startup founded by former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati, is releasing Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion parameters. The company claims it is the strongest western open-weight model. The Decoder reports that improved agentic performance comes with sharply higher token usage. Open weights let developers download and run a model rather than relying solely on a provider's hosted service. That makes the release relevant to people building applications and comparing models they can operate themselves. It also means the company's claim enters a competitive field where the exact comparison matters: 'strongest western open-weight model' is a narrower title than strongest model overall. Tokens are units used to process text, and using more of them can add to the resources needed to perform a task. A developer weighing the model therefore has at least two questions: how well does it do the work, and how much processing does that work require? A higher score may be valuable even when it brings a higher bill, but the tradeoff belongs in the same conversation as the headline claim. The industry's favorite trophy is first place. Its least decorative accessory is the usage meter. Inkling's pitch asks developers to admire both the performance and the price of getting it. The crown may be open for anyone to examine; keeping it polished still takes computing resources.
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