Inkling vs. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite

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.

Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is distinguished as the fastest model in Google's Gemini 3.5 series, designed specifically for low-latency tasks and enhancing developer workflows that require high throughput, such as agentic search, document processing, coding, and comprehensive data analysis. It features an impressive output rate of 350 tokens per second and represents a substantial upgrade from previous Flash-Lite versions in both quality and agentic functionalities. Developers can tailor the model's cognitive level based on the task requirements: minimal or low thinking is ideal for quick processing of large datasets, while higher thinking levels are suited for more complex, multi-step workflows that involve subagents. Additionally, the model comes with integrated computational abilities, allowing it to function seamlessly in various digital environments across supported platforms. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite also shines in coding tasks, managing lengthy contexts, and carrying out real-world applications, consistently surpassing the performance of its predecessor, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, in crucial evaluations and even outdoing Gemini 3 Flash in numerous benchmarks related to agentic capabilities and software development. This remarkable performance demonstrates its potential to revolutionize the way developers tackle intricate workflows and handle data-heavy tasks, making it a game-changer in the field. As developers continue to explore its capabilities, they are likely to uncover new applications that further enhance their productivity.