gpt-oss-120b vs. Inkling

gpt-oss-120b is a reasoning model focused solely on text, boasting 120 billion parameters, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license while adhering to OpenAI’s usage policies; it has been developed with contributions from the open-source community and is compatible with the Responses API. This model excels at executing instructions and utilizes various tools, including web searches and Python code execution, which allows for a customizable level of reasoning effort and results in detailed chain-of-thought outputs that can seamlessly fit into different workflows. Although it is constructed to comply with OpenAI's safety policies, its open-weight nature poses a risk, as adept users might modify it to bypass these protections, thereby prompting developers and organizations to implement additional safety measures akin to those of managed models. Assessments reveal that gpt-oss-120b falls short of high performance in specialized fields such as biology, chemistry, or cybersecurity, even after attempts at adversarial fine-tuning. Moreover, its introduction does not represent a substantial advancement in biological capabilities, indicating a cautious stance regarding its use. Consequently, it is advisable for users to stay alert to the potential risks associated with its open-weight attributes, and to consider the implications of its deployment in sensitive environments. As awareness of these factors grows, the community's approach to managing such technologies will evolve and adapt.

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.