Inkling vs. Gemini 3.6 Flash

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 3.6 Flash is a new Google Gemini model designed for efficient, high-quality AI agents and production workloads. It builds on Gemini 3.5 Flash with improvements in coding, knowledge work, multimodal understanding, computer use, and complex workflow execution. Google positions Gemini 3.6 Flash as the workhorse model in the Flash series, optimized for the balance of quality, speed, reliability, and cost. The model is designed to reduce verbosity, use fewer output tokens, take fewer reasoning steps, and require fewer tool calls during multi-step tasks. Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash uses 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis Index and can reduce output usage even more on some coding benchmarks. It is priced at $1.50 per 1 million input tokens and $7.50 per 1 million output tokens, giving developers a lower-cost option for agentic workflows than 3.5 Flash. Gemini 3.6 Flash shows gains in benchmarks for software engineering, ML research, computer use, and knowledge work. It can support use cases such as code migration, document parsing, financial data analysis, chart interpretation, report drafting, visual interface building, and multi-agent orchestration. Built-in computer use is available through the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise, helping agents interact with digital tools more reliably. Google also says the model ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards for CBRN and cyber offense misuse while minimizing refusals for beneficial use cases. By combining lower cost, stronger task performance, multimodal understanding, built-in computer use, and safety improvements, Gemini 3.6 Flash is built for teams that need scalable AI agents across software, enterprise, and productivity workflows.