Inkling vs. GPT-5.6 Terra

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.

GPT-5.6 Terra is a balanced model in OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 series, designed to provide strong performance for everyday work while keeping costs lower than the flagship Sol tier. The GPT-5.6 family includes Sol for the highest capability, Terra for balanced work, and Luna for fast and affordable use cases. Terra is positioned as a practical option for developers, businesses, and enterprise teams that need capable reasoning, coding, automation, research support, and defensive security assistance without always using the most expensive model. According to the pasted preview text, Terra offers competitive performance to GPT-5.5 while being 2x cheaper. It appears in GPT-5.6 benchmark previews for Terminal-Bench 2.1, GeneBench v1, ExploitBench, and ExploitGym, showing that the model is intended for technical and long-horizon tasks as well as general work. Terra can support coding workflows that require planning, iteration, command-line reasoning, and tool coordination. It can also support legitimate cybersecurity workflows such as code review, vulnerability research, patch development, debugging, security education, and defensive testing. The model is developed with layered safeguards matched to its capabilities, including trained refusals, real-time checks, misuse classifiers, monitoring, enforcement, and account-level review. OpenAI also describes automated red-teaming and third-party human expert red-teaming as part of the broader GPT-5.6 safety process. Terra is priced below Sol in the pasted API pricing structure, with lower input and output costs per 1 million tokens. GPT-5.6 Terra helps organizations use a capable GPT-5.6 model for production workflows where performance, cost efficiency, and safety controls all matter.