ToPo-ToPo/Inkling-Small-mlx-2bit
MLX 2bit conversion of thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small
for Apple Silicon (mlx-vlm). 276B total / 12B active sparse MoE (42 layers, 256 routed experts top-6 + 2 shared),
text + image + audio in, text out.
See also: ToPo-ToPo/Inkling-Small-mlx-4bit.
Requires mlx-vlm >= 0.6.9
0.6.9 is the first release whose models/inkling can load an official Inkling checkpoint through the
public loader, and the first that implements the MoE global_scale / gate.bias tensors. On 0.6.7 / 0.6.8
this repo will not load.
from mlx_vlm import load, generate
model, processor = load("ToPo-ToPo/Inkling-Small-mlx-2bit")
The config is the official schema, unmodified — no key translation and no loader patches are needed.
Provenance (self-converted from official weights)
- Source:
thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small(license: apache-2.0, bf16, 531.9 GB) - Tool:
mlx-vlm 0.6.9—mlx_vlm.convert --hf-path thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small --mlx-path . -q --q-bits 2 --q-group-size 64 - Effective: 2.506 bits/weight (77 GiB on disk)
- Only edit on top of the conversion:
pad_token/eos_tokenadded totokenizer_config.json(the officialTokenizersBackendconfig sets neither, so transformers raises on any padded call). Both point at existing ids — the vocabulary is unchanged.
Reasoning effort
The chat template always injects a Thinking effort level: system message (default 0.9). Control it
with the OpenAI-compatible reasoning_effort — "none" / "minimal" / "low" / "medium" / "high" /
"max", or a float in [0.0, 0.99]. "none" disables thinking entirely.
When serving over mlx_vlm.server, note that Inkling wraps its answer in structural tokens
(<|message_model|>, <|content_text|>, <|end_message|>) which the server's fixed
_CONTENT_MARKERS list does not strip, and that its reasoning channel is
<|content_thinking|> … <|end_message|><|message_model|> rather than one of the built-in marker pairs.
Set MLX_VLM_THINKING_START_TOKEN / MLX_VLM_THINKING_END_TOKEN accordingly and strip the structural
tokens, or the reasoning and those markers end up in content.
Revision history
- 2026-08-04 — reconverted with mlx-vlm 0.6.9. The previous upload had been converted with 0.6.7,
whose
models/inklingdid not implement the MoEmlp.global_scale(50 keys) andmlp.gate.bias(40 keys) present in the official checkpoint, so those tensors were silently dropped. It also shipped a translated config (renamedintermediate_size/dense_intermediate_size, etc.) that 0.6.9 rejects. If you pulled this repo before this date, re-download it.