Qwen3.8-Flash-Next vs. Inkling

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is a pioneering open-weight multimodal Mixture-of-Experts architecture that offers an initial look at the design meant for its successor, Qwen4. This model has been expertly crafted to enhance various aspects such as attention mechanisms, residual pathways, embeddings, and optimization strategies, thereby increasing its overall functionality, enhancing computational efficiency, expanding its model capacity, and ensuring stability during training. Its unique hybrid structure combines Gated DeltaNet, which effectively condenses historical information, with Qwen Sparse Attention, facilitating the selection of meaningful context on a micro-block scale to reduce both attention and indexing expenses for lengthy sequences. The Gated Residual feature enhances the residual pathway by incorporating four streams, which helps in dynamically regulating the information flow across different layers. Moreover, the N-gram Embedding cleverly merges large-scale local-pattern memory with minimal computational overhead for each token, with the capability to transfer to host memory for added efficiency. The entire model is built around a main network comprising 125 billion parameters, supplemented by an additional 51 billion parameters specifically for N-gram embeddings, activating only 6 billion parameters for each token processed. This advanced framework underscores the continuous evolution in machine learning architectures, laying the groundwork for exciting future innovations, and it exemplifies the increasing sophistication and potential of multimodal models in various applications.

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.