Inkling vs. GLM-5.1

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.

GLM-5.1 marks the newest evolution in Z.ai’s GLM lineup, designed as a state-of-the-art AI model focused on agents, specifically for tasks involving coding, logical reasoning, and overseeing long-term processes. This version builds on the foundation set by GLM-5, which utilizes a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework to maximize performance while keeping inference costs low, supporting a broader vision of making weight models available to developers. A key feature of GLM-5.1 is its ability to promote agentic behavior, enabling it to plan, execute, and enhance multi-step tasks rather than just responding to single prompts. The model is meticulously crafted to handle complex workflows, such as troubleshooting code, navigating repositories, and conducting sequential tasks, all while preserving context over extended periods. Compared to earlier models, GLM-5.1 provides improved reliability during prolonged interactions, ensuring consistency throughout longer sessions and reducing errors in multi-step reasoning tasks. Furthermore, this advancement represents a significant step forward in the realm of AI, especially in its proficiency for managing intricate task workflows with ease. With its innovative features, GLM-5.1 sets a new standard for what agent-focused AI can achieve in practical applications.