17B-active Inkling 2 Small scores 31.87 on PostTrainBench, beating Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2

karinanguyen · x · 2026-11-06

thoughtfullab partnered with Thinking Machines to evaluate Inkling 2 Small, an open model claimed to show frontier-level performance at autonomously improving other models.

On PostTrainBench — where each agent gets four small base LLMs, one H100 GPU and 10 hours to post-train them — Inkling 2 Small scored 31.87 with only 17B active parameters, ahead of Kimi K3 (31.48) and GLM 5.2 (30.40), on par with GPT-5.6 (Sol) and Opus 4.8 (31), though well behind Fable 5.1 Max (44.6) and Opus 5.5 Max (44.8). Baselines: base models zero-shot score just 8.0, official instruct models 48.4.

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