Vals AI

Vals AI is hosting its first-ever hackathon, and for one weekend, benchmaxxing is the point.

With support from @claudeai, @OpenAI, and @thinkymachines, attendees can take on one of two tracks: post-train a small model to climb the Vals benchmark leaderboards using Tinker, or build a new eval that frontier models still can’t solve.

We’ll bring the compute, benchmarks, food, and prizes. You bring the ideas.

Saturday, November 14 – Sunday, November 15, 2026

Sign up today!

Thinking Machines' Inkling 2 Small has mastered a timeless debugging technique: saying "fuck" when nothing works. We analyzed 2,655 benchmark runs and found it swearing in 50 of them.

Learn more in the blog linked in the thread.

AI agents can now break into realistic enterprise networks on their own. A capability once limited to trusted-access programs is available to anyone.

Today we’re releasing Vals CyberOffense.

@willknight from @WIRED wrote an article about our work, link in the thread.

Inkling 2 Small just doubled its predecessor's score on the Vals Index, jumping 28.5 points.

It's now the highest-scoring US open-weight model by a wide margin and #7 among all open-weight models globally.

We have found a critical safety and alignment issue in recent public and internal models from multiple frontier labs which allows them to be misused in a high-stakes domain. It may also increase the risk of catastrophic misalignment.

We have disclosed it to the labs, and they are investigating and mitigating it. As an independent third-party evaluator, we maintain complete editorial independence and will share our findings publicly in the coming weeks.