Inkling vs. Beam

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.

Beam marks the launch of Reflection’s first open-weight model, distinguished by its sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, which boasts an impressive 501 billion parameters, with 23 billion actively engaged, specifically designed for tasks related to coding, reasoning, and agentic functions. This model's capabilities stem from rigorous pretraining and reinforcement learning, built upon a massive dataset of 23.8 trillion diverse, high-quality tokens obtained from various sources, including the internet, public domains, and proprietary licenses. By focusing on optimizing coding and agentic functionalities, Beam aims to deliver competitive performance in the open-weight space while prioritizing efficient inference computation. It is proficient in managing a diverse range of tasks, such as complex software development, terminal commands, STEM-related activities, web searches, tool application, and general knowledge queries. Utilizing reinforcement learning methods enhances its proficiency in multi-step reasoning, effective tool use, and adaptability to environmental cues. Furthermore, users can customize the model's output by adjusting a reasoning effort parameter, allowing for a tailored balance between efficiency and performance to meet their individual requirements. In essence, Beam is not only a technological advancement but also a versatile tool that empowers users to navigate complex tasks with precision.