Mixtral 8x7B vs. Inkling

The Mixtral 8x7B model represents a cutting-edge sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) architecture that features open weights and is made available under the Apache 2.0 license. This innovative model outperforms Llama 2 70B across a range of benchmarks, while also achieving inference speeds that are sixfold faster. As the premier open-weight model with a versatile licensing structure, Mixtral stands out for its impressive cost-effectiveness and performance metrics. Furthermore, it competes with and frequently exceeds the capabilities of GPT-3.5 in many established benchmarks, underscoring its importance in the AI landscape. Its unique blend of accessibility, rapid processing, and overall effectiveness positions it as an attractive option for developers in search of top-tier AI solutions. Consequently, the Mixtral model not only enhances the current technological landscape but also paves the way for future advancements in AI development.

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.