SmolVLM vs. Inkling

SmolVLM-Instruct is an efficient multimodal AI model that adeptly merges vision and language processing, allowing it to execute tasks such as image captioning, answering visual questions, and creating multimodal narratives. Its capability to handle both text and image inputs makes it an ideal choice for environments with limited resources. By employing SmolLM2 as its text decoder in conjunction with SigLIP for image encoding, it significantly boosts performance in tasks requiring the integration of text and visuals. Furthermore, SmolVLM-Instruct can be tailored for specific use cases, offering businesses and developers a versatile tool that fosters the development of intelligent and interactive systems utilizing multimodal data. This flexibility enhances its appeal for various sectors, paving the way for groundbreaking application developments across multiple industries while encouraging creative solutions to complex problems.

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.