Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Inkling 2 Small vs Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

Inkling 2 Small scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2's 54.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6472 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Inkling 2 Small C

Best for Teams with 512 GB or more of datacentre GPU memory who want Thinking Machines' newest open multimodal agent model and can run a runtime's pre-release image.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 45
  • Agent interface, 85 against 75
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 50

Watch for

The smaller checkpoint needs about 472 GB, and Thinking Machines says 500 GB of GPU memory

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 C

Best for Pipelines with an NVIDIA GPU that need long scanned or rendered documents parsed in one pass, with page order, cross-page tables and boxes kept

Ahead on

  • Reach, 55 against 40

Watch for

Loading runs Baidu's code, remote code in Transformers or a prebuilt SGLang fork from the repository, and the save_results path calls eval on model output

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Risk Inkling 2 Small +20

Inkling 2 Small 65

File safety 25, safetensors only and no repository code to run. Provenance 15, the files are in the organisation Thinking Machines links to, with a SHA-256 on every LFS file. Safety evaluation 10, Thinking Machines' own StrongREJECT, FORTRESS, HoneyBench and DistressBench results and described outside red-teaming, but nothing an outside party published or a harness to rerun. Agent guidance 5, the card names safeguards to add but doesn't say what its refusals cover, with nothing on prompt injection. Licence risk 5, 10 off for a use policy that reaches beyond the law and that can change at any time. Security programme 5, a security.txt and a disclosure policy, with public advisories unchecked and scored as absent. 25 + 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 65.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 45

File safety gets 15, safetensors only but loaded with trust_remote_code or through a prebuilt SGLang wheel from the repository. Provenance gets 15 for files in Baidu's verified organisation, linked from its GitHub organisation, with hashes for every file. Licence risk keeps 15, since MIT has none of the deductions. Safety evaluation, agent guidance and the security programme score 0, with no safety results, no cautions about use and no security contact found.

Documentation and upkeep Inkling 2 Small +17

Inkling 2 Small 67

Model card 17 of 20, everything but a dated knowledge cut-off. Training data 15, an EU training-content summary with sources, mix, an October 2026 collection cut-off and filtering. Last change 20, the files were uploaded on 12 November 2026. Responsiveness 0, the repository has no questions yet, which reads as none answered. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 10, the files agree and no broken-file report waits. 17 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 67.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 50

The card covers intended use and the new attention, and misses limitations, parameters, context length, languages and a cut-off (5). Training data is described by mix and labelling with no datasets named and no cut-off (5). The card changed on 2 November 2026 and the SGLang wheel on 29 October (20). Baidu's uploader replied in 1 of the 5 Hub discussions, a few (5). The first model stays in its own repository without a note pointing here (5), and the files agree with the card (10).

Reach Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 +15

Inkling 2 Small 40

Memory 0 of 30, the smallest build is Thinking Machines' NVFP4 checkpoint at 393.5 GB, about 472 GB with a fifth added, above the 256 GB line. Runtimes 0, no released version of the six runs it; vLLM and SGLang serve it from their own images and Transformers has it on its main branch only. Builds 15, two precisions from the publisher (NVFP4 and MXFP8). Terms 10, Apache 2.0 with a binding acceptable use policy on top, read as a custom licence. Download 10, no gate. Hosted 5, Thinking Machines' own Tinker serves it as beta serverless inference, and Together is live on Hugging Face. 0 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 40.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 55

Memory earns the full 30, since the only build is 6.69 GB of BF16 weights that need about 8 GB with the fifth added. Runtimes score 0. Released vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23 and Transformers 5.22.1 know the first Unlimited-OCR but not the sparse attention this one adds, Baidu's own routes are remote code in Transformers and a customised SGLang wheel, llama.cpp b12111 has nothing for it, so Ollama has nothing either, and LM Studio couldn't be checked. Builds score 0, as Baidu publishes no quantised build (16 exist, all by others). Terms get 15 for MIT with nothing added. Download gets 10 for an ungated repository, and hosted too 0, with no inference provider mapped and the card's Baidu Cloud line unconfirmed.

Agent interface Inkling 2 Small +10

Inkling 2 Small 85

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Thinking Machines' tml-renderers guide shows how tools are declared and how calls come back for this model, and its package ships the parser. Trained tool calling 20, several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 10, thinking effort is set per request from none to xhigh, and the reasoning comes back in reasoning_content. Context 10, up to 1M tokens. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 75

Read for a document parser, the tool-calling, trained tool calling and structured-output lines stand for what it takes and returns. Baidu documents the page images, the prompt, the request settings and the block output, and ships a converter for the server's output (25). It was trained to read many pages in one request (20). The block format with classes, boxes and HTML tables, and its conversion to Markdown, are documented with how to get them (15). The prompt is built in code, with no Jinja template in the repository (10). Reasoning control scores 0, and the context 5, trained at up to 64K tokens.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runInkling 2 SmallBaidu Unlimited-OCR-2Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%254055Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 +15
Risk20%206545Inkling 2 Small +20
Agent interface10%108575Inkling 2 Small +10
Documentation and upkeep10%106750Inkling 2 Small +17
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 58.8/100C 54.2/100

Facts side by side

FactInkling 2 SmallBaidu Unlimited-OCR-2
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThinking Machines LabBaidu
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT (Hub metadata; the Hugging Face repository has no LICENSE file, and the GitHub code repository's LICENSE is the MIT text, copyright 2026 Baidu)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-122026-10-26
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Inkling 2 Small

Thinking Machines' newest open model, a 594B mixture-of-experts generalist with images in, several tool calls a turn and per-request thinking effort. The NVFP4 checkpoint needs about 472 GB, and no released runtime runs it yet, so today that means vLLM's or SGLang's own images, or Tinker and Together hosted. The use policy binds on download and can change.

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

An MIT document parser of 3.3B parameters that reads up to hundreds of pages in one request and returns ordered layout blocks with boxes and HTML tables. ParseBench's independent run puts content faithfulness at 89.16 and charts at 1.06. It needs an NVIDIA GPU with about 12 GB and runs only through Baidu's remote code or its own SGLang build.

Before you call either

Inkling 2 Small

  1. No released runtime runs it yet. Serve the NVFP4 checkpoint from SGLang's dev-inkling-2-small image with the cookbook's recipe for your hardware, or from vLLM's vllm/vllm-openai:inkling-2-small image
  2. In vLLM pass --reasoning-parser inkling --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser inkling. In SGLang the tool-call parser is inkling2 and the reasoning parser inkling
  3. Transformers' main branch loads only thinkingmachines/Inkling-2-Small-MXFP8, the 622.8 GB checkpoint, and no release has the code yet
  4. Pass reasoning_effort as none, minimal, low, medium, high (the default), xhigh or max, or a number from 0 to 0.99
  5. Effort none conditions the model toward no reasoning but doesn't forbid it, and higher effort needs a larger max_tokens
  6. Tool call arguments must reach the template as an object, not a JSON string, or it raises an error
  7. Images should be 40 to 4096 px a side. The model takes no audio, and the template raises an error for an audio part
  8. Use guided decoding or validate JSON yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  9. Without the hardware, call it on Tinker's OpenAI-compatible endpoint with a Tinker key, at $0.30 input and $1.00 output per million tokens as read on 6 November 2026
  10. Read the Model Acceptable Use Policy before deploying, it binds on download and bars some uses that are legal

Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

  1. Quickest local run, pip install torch==2.13.0 torchvision pillow transformers==4.52.1 huggingface-hub==0.36.0 tokenizers==0.21.4 addict==2.4.0 einops==0.8.2 easydict==1.13, then AutoModel.from_pretrained("baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2", trust_remote_code=True, use_safetensors=True, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16).eval().cuda() and model.infer_multi(tokenizer, image_files=pages, output_path="out")
  2. To serve it, download the repository, install wheel/sglang-0.5.20.dev13+g75b9b06b02-py3-none-any.whl with pymupdf and fastokens in a Python 3.10 venv, and start python -m sglang.launch_server --model-path baidu/Unlimited-OCR-2 --chat-template unlimited-ocr --enable-custom-logit-processor --enable-streaming-session --disable-radix-cache --mem-fraction-static 0.7 --max-prefill-tokens 2048 with the SGLANG_UOCR_ variables from the card
  3. Send all pages of a document in one request, images first, then the text <PAGE><image> repeated per page and Multi page parsing., with temperature 0, skip_special_tokens false, max_tokens of about 8,000 per page and the DeepseekOCRNoRepeatNGramLogitProcessor (ngram_size 35, window_size 1024 for several pages)
  4. The output is layout blocks, not Markdown; run utils/process_unlimitedOCR2.py from github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR, or convert(raw_output) in Python, to get Markdown with HTML tables
  5. Render PDFs to images first (the card uses PyMuPDF at 300 DPI), keep save_results off for untrusted documents, and treat extracted text as untrusted before passing it to another model

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Inkling 2 Small or Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2?

Inkling 2 Small scores 58.8 (C) on agent readiness against Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2's 54.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2 leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Inkling 2 Small or Baidu Unlimited-OCR-2

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