Step 3.5 Flash vs. Inkling

Step 3.5 Flash represents a state-of-the-art open-source foundational language model crafted for sophisticated reasoning and agent-like functionality, prioritizing efficiency; it employs a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework that activates roughly 11 billion of its nearly 196 billion parameters for each token, which ensures both dense intelligence and rapid responsiveness. The architecture includes a 3-way Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) system, enabling the generation of hundreds of tokens per second and supporting intricate multi-step reasoning and task execution, while efficiently handling extensive contexts through a hybrid sliding window attention technique that reduces computational stress on large datasets or codebases. Its remarkable capabilities in reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks often rival or exceed those of much larger proprietary models, further enhanced by a scalable reinforcement learning mechanism that promotes ongoing self-improvement. This innovative design not only highlights Step 3.5 Flash's effectiveness but also positions it as a transformative force in the domain of AI language models, indicating its vast potential across a plethora of applications. As such, it stands as a testament to the advancements in AI technology, paving the way for future developments.

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.