MAI-Thinking-1 vs. Inkling

MAI-Thinking-1 is an advanced reasoning model developed by Microsoft AI, specifically designed to address complex and significant issues, showcasing exceptional reasoning skills and strong software engineering capabilities within its class. With a configuration of 35 billion active parameters and approximately 1 trillion total parameters structured as a sparse Mixture of Experts, this model offers a more efficient inference footprint compared to larger counterparts while delivering performance that rivals top models on crucial software engineering evaluations. Microsoft crafted MAI-Thinking-1 from the ground up, employing high-quality, enterprise-grade, commercially licensed data to ensure its capabilities are acquired rather than sourced from external models. As a key component of Microsoft's innovative Hill-Climbing Machine, the model enjoys a collaborative development approach aimed at continuous and reliable improvements throughout all phases of its creation. MAI-Thinking-1 excels in agentic coding environments, possessing the ability to read and modify code, run tests, identify errors, and recover from mistakes during the process. Its capacity to adapt and learn in real-time enhances its value for developers who prioritize efficiency and reliability in their work. Ultimately, this model redefines the expectations for software engineering tools, blending advanced AI with practical coding applications to drive innovation in the field.

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.