List of the Top 6 Foundation Models for Tinker in 2026

Inkling is an open-weights multimodal AI model from Thinking Machines built to support customization, agentic workflows, coding, reasoning, vision, audio, and enterprise AI use cases. The model is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, 256 routed experts per MoE layer, and six routed experts active per token. It supports context windows up to 1 million tokens and was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens across text, images, audio, and video. Inkling is designed as a broad foundation model rather than a narrowly optimized benchmark model, giving it balanced capabilities across reasoning, coding, factuality, instruction following, vision, audio, tool use, and safety. Its controllable thinking effort lets developers adjust how much computation and generated reasoning the model uses, helping teams balance quality, latency, and cost for different production needs. The model can run agentic coding tasks, use tools, create web apps, generate polished multi-page artifacts, reason over long contexts, and work through iterative refinement loops. For multimodal tasks, Inkling can process images, answer questions about visual content, transcribe and reason over audio, follow spoken instructions, and combine visual reasoning with code-based tools such as Python. Thinking Machines trained Inkling for calibration, instruction following, factual reliability, refusal behavior, and safety across multiple modalities, including evaluations for dangerous capabilities and human-AI threat vectors. Inkling is available on Tinker for fine-tuning, with 64K and 256K context options, an Inkling Playground for testing, cookbook recipes, and support for multimodal post-training workflows. Its full weights are available on Hugging Face, and deployment support is available through APIs and infrastructure partners such as TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, Baseten, SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and transformers.

Qwen is an advanced AI assistant and development platform powered by Alibaba Cloud’s cutting-edge Qwen model family, offering powerful multimodal reasoning and creativity tools for users at all skill levels. It provides a free and accessible interface through Qwen Chat, where anyone can generate images, analyze content, perform deep multi-step research, and build fully coded web pages simply by describing what they want. Using its VLo model, Qwen transforms ideas into detailed visuals and supports editing, style transfer, and complex multi-element image creation. Deep Research acts like an automated research partner, gathering information online, synthesizing insights, and generating structured reports in minutes. The Web Dev feature empowers users to create modern, ready-to-deploy websites with clean code using only natural language instructions. Qwen’s enhanced “Thinking” capabilities provide stronger logic, structured problem-solving, and real-time internet-aware analysis. Its Search tool retrieves precise results with contextual understanding, while multimodal intelligence enables Qwen to process images, audio, video, and text together for deeper comprehension. For developers, the Qwen API offers OpenAI-compatible endpoints, allowing seamless integration of Qwen’s reasoning, generation, and multimodal abilities into any application or product. This makes Qwen not only an AI assistant but also a versatile platform for builders and engineers. Across web, desktop, and mobile environments, Qwen delivers a unified, high-performance AI experience.

We have integrated Llama 3 into Meta AI, our smart assistant that transforms the way people perform tasks, innovate, and interact with technology. By leveraging Meta AI for coding and troubleshooting, users can directly experience the power of Llama 3. Whether you are developing agents or other AI-based solutions, Llama 3, which is offered in both 8B and 70B variants, delivers the essential features and adaptability needed to turn your concepts into reality. In conjunction with the launch of Llama 3, we have updated our Responsible Use Guide (RUG) to provide comprehensive recommendations on the ethical development of large language models. Our approach focuses on enhancing trust and safety measures, including the introduction of Llama Guard 2, which aligns with the newly established taxonomy from MLCommons and expands its coverage to include a broader range of safety categories, alongside code shield and Cybersec Eval 2. Moreover, these improvements are designed to promote a safer and more responsible application of AI technologies across different fields, ensuring that users can confidently harness these innovations. The commitment to ethical standards reflects our dedication to fostering a secure and trustworthy AI environment.

We are excited to unveil an open-source AI model that offers the ability to be fine-tuned, distilled, and deployed across a wide range of platforms. Our latest instruction-tuned model is available in three different sizes: 8B, 70B, and 405B, allowing you to select an option that best fits your unique needs. The open ecosystem we provide accelerates your development journey with a variety of customized product offerings tailored to meet your specific project requirements. You can choose between real-time inference and batch inference services, depending on what your project requires, giving you added flexibility to optimize performance. Furthermore, downloading model weights can significantly enhance cost efficiency per token while you fine-tune the model for your application. To further improve performance, you can leverage synthetic data and seamlessly deploy your solutions either on-premises or in the cloud. By taking advantage of Llama system components, you can also expand the model's capabilities through the use of zero-shot tools and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), promoting more agentic behaviors in your applications. Utilizing the extensive 405B high-quality data enables you to fine-tune specialized models that cater specifically to various use cases, ensuring that your applications function at their best. In conclusion, this empowers developers to craft innovative solutions that not only meet efficiency standards but also drive effectiveness in their respective domains, leading to a significant impact on the technology landscape.

The newest version of the open-source AI framework, which can be customized and utilized across different platforms, is available in several configurations: 1B, 3B, 11B, and 90B, while still offering the option to use Llama 3.1. Llama 3.2 includes a selection of large language models (LLMs) that are pretrained and fine-tuned specifically for multilingual text processing in 1B and 3B sizes, whereas the 11B and 90B models support both text and image inputs, generating text outputs. This latest release empowers users to build highly effective applications that cater to specific requirements. For applications running directly on devices, such as summarizing conversations or managing calendars, the 1B or 3B models are excellent selections. On the other hand, the 11B and 90B models are particularly suited for tasks involving images, allowing users to manipulate existing pictures or glean further insights from images in their surroundings. Ultimately, this broad spectrum of models opens the door for developers to experiment with creative applications across a wide array of fields, enhancing the potential for innovation and impact.

The latest iteration in the Llama series, Llama 3.3, marks a notable leap forward in the realm of language models, designed to improve AI's abilities in both understanding and communication. It features enhanced contextual reasoning, more refined language generation, and state-of-the-art fine-tuning capabilities that yield remarkably accurate, human-like responses for a wide array of applications. This version benefits from a broader training dataset, advanced algorithms that allow for deeper comprehension, and reduced biases when compared to its predecessors. Llama 3.3 excels in various domains such as natural language understanding, creative writing, technical writing, and multilingual conversations, making it an invaluable tool for businesses, developers, and researchers. Furthermore, its modular design lends itself to adaptable deployment across specific sectors, ensuring consistent performance and flexibility even in expansive applications. With these significant improvements, Llama 3.3 is set to transform the benchmarks for AI language models and inspire further innovations in the field. It is an exciting time for AI development as this new version opens doors to novel possibilities in human-computer interaction.