Inkling-Small vs. Inkling

Inkling-Small is an efficient multimodal AI model built to deliver strong reasoning and coding performance at a fraction of Inkling’s size. It is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 276 billion total parameters and 12 billion active parameters. The model was trained on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems and is designed to combine high capability with more efficient inference. Inkling-Small supports native reasoning across text, images, and audio, allowing it to work across multimodal tasks without relying on separate encoders. Its context window supports up to one million tokens, making it useful for long-form reasoning, large-scale code understanding, document analysis, and agentic workflows. Users can adjust reasoning effort from minimal to extra high depending on whether they need faster responses or deeper computation. The model’s training process includes improved pre-training data, post-training with on-policy distillation from Inkling, and extended agentic coding reinforcement learning. These techniques helped Inkling-Small outperform its larger counterpart on reasoning and coding benchmarks. The model performs well in coding and tool-use harnesses and exceeds 80% on SWE-bench Verified. Its encoder-free architecture processes audio as dMel spectrograms and images as 40-by-40-pixel patches alongside text tokens. By combining efficient MoE design, one-million-token context, adjustable reasoning effort, multimodal processing, coding strength, and tool-use performance, Inkling-Small is designed for developers and teams that need capable AI with lower active compute requirements.

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.