Models / Thinking Machines/ Inkling Small

Inkling Small

Thinking Machines · released Jul 27, 2026 · thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small

Input: text, images and audio. Output: text.InputOutput
Type
Open weightsApache License 2.0
Params
266B
Context
524K

about 393K words of context

Our take

Written Aug 3, 2026

Inkling Small is a large downloadable model from Thinking Machines that accepts text, images and audio, and can handle up to 524,288 tokens in a single request. Released in 2026 under a permissive Apache licence, it is built for long-document and multimodal workflows, though no quality benchmarks are yet available.

Who should pick it

Pick this for extremely long documents or multimodal pipelines combining text, image and audio, or when your project requires a licence that permits commercial use and redistribution. Skip it if you need measured quality scores or the lowest per-token cost among open models.

The case for it

  • 524,288-token request limit — twice the length of the other open model with a disclosed context in this input.
  • Apache 2.0 licence allows commercial use, fine-tuning and redistribution without restriction.
  • Accepts text, images and audio in a single model.
  • Measured at up to 189 tokens per second on one endpoint, the faster of two measured hosts.

The case against it

  • No benchmark scores of any kind in our data — no measured quality to judge against peers.
  • 266 billion parameters with no active-parameter count disclosed, so efficiency claims are unverified.
  • Costs several times more per token than smaller open alternatives; throughput also varies sharply across endpoints.
00

How good is it?

We hold no score for this model.

We look for every model we track on every board we watch, and none of them has turned up Inkling Small — so there is no intelligence, coding, agentic or writing score to show you, not a low one, none.

The boards we watch →

01

Can you run it yourself?

Fits in memory
weights load entirely on the card
Spills to system RAM
some weights offload; much slower
Too large
will not load even with offload
est
size is calculated; the verdict could change by 10%
A card many people ownToo large

GeForce RTX 4090 · 24 GB

Weights at Q4_K_M167.7 / 24 GBest
Usable contextNot calculated for spilled setups
Decode speedNot estimated for spilled setups

Too large for this card. The weights do not fit even with part of them offloaded to system memory.

One step upToo large

Apple M1 Pro (16-core GPU) · 32 GB

Weights at Q4_K_M167.7 / 32 GBest
Usable contextNot calculated for spilled setups
Decode speedNot estimated for spilled setups

Too large for this card. The weights do not fit even with part of them offloaded to system memory.

Comfortable fit

On a MacFits in memory

Apple M3 Ultra (80-core GPU) · 512 GB

Weights at Q4_K_M167.7 / 512 GBest
Spare memory209.7 GB spare
Usable context262K of 524K
Decode speed3 tok/sest

Room to spare. 209.7 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.

Your hardware
Checking your profile…

Memory use by level

Against a 24 GB card.

Q4_K_M
recommended
167.7 GBest
Too large
Q5_K_M
196.8 GBest
Too large
Q8_0
293.9 GBest
Too large

All 3 sizes here are calculated, not measured. We hold no measured file for this model, so each size comes from the parameter count and every verdict above inherits that uncertainty.

Check against your own machine → · All 71 devices, with every size →

02

Or rent it from someone else

Cheapest published offer

Cheapest of 4 live listings. Picked at the widest standard context we hold, within one quantisation slice, so the numbers beside it are a price one host actually charges.

per 1M tokens
$0.50 in / $1.20 out
Context served
524K
Throughput
Not measured
Current provider offers with price, context and prompt-privacy answers
ProviderIn / out per 1M tokensContextThroughputTrains on promptsLogs promptsZero retention
OpenRouter$0.50 / $1.20524Knot measuredUnknownUnknownUnknown
DeepInfrafp8$0.45 / $1.20524Knot measuredUnknownUnknownUnknown
DeepInfrafp8$0.45 / $1.20524K164 tok/sNoNoConfirmed
Together AI$0.50 / $1.20524K119 tok/sNoNoConfirmed

Across the 4 listings we hold: 2 say they do not train on prompts, 0 say they do and 2 do not say. 2 appear in the zero-retention registry we check; the rest are unknown to us rather than confirmed either way.

What each host's API supports

From the parameter list each endpoint publishes. Streaming is omitted: nothing we hold reports it, for any model.

Supported
Not supported
Not published
host gave no parameter list
API features per host
ProviderTool callingJSON outputStrict schema
OpenRouter
DeepInfrafp8
DeepInfrafp8
Together AI

Tool calling: 2 of 4 listings say yes, 1 says no, 1 publishes no parameter list. JSON output: 0 of 4 listings say yes, 3 say no, 1 publishes no parameter list. Strict schema: 0 of 4 listings say yes, 3 say no, 1 publishes no parameter list.

03

When we formed this view

Dates behind this page

Aug 2, 2026Price changeDeepInfra cut Inkling Small pricing by 10%input −10% ($0.50 → $0.45 per 1M tokens)
Aug 2, 2026Price changeDeepInfra cut Inkling Small pricing by 10%input −10% ($0.50 → $0.45 per 1M tokens)
Aug 1, 2026ListedListed on LLMapfirst indexed by our pipeline
Jul 30, 2026ReleaseInkling Small listedNew model detected on OpenRouter: thinkingmachines/inkling-small
Jul 27, 2026AnnouncedInkling Small announced by Thinking Machines

Prices last checked 3d ago

What we do not know about this model yet

  • We hold no measured file for it, so all 3 sizes on this page are calculated from the parameter count.
  • No board we watch has turned up a score, so we hold no quality figures at all.
  • 1 of 4 listings publish no parameter list, so what their API accepts is unknown to us.
  • Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
  • 2 of 4 listings do not say whether they train on prompts.
04

Licence and identifiers

What the licence allowsApache License 2.0, what it allows commercially, and the identifiers you need to pull this model — its Hugging Face repo, our slug and a machine-readable card.

Licence

Apache License 2.0

permissiveCommercial use allowed

Fully permissive: commercial use, redistribution, and derivatives allowed. Requires attribution and a copy of the license. Includes an express patent grant.

Identifiers

Architecture
Dense
Modality record
text+image+audio->text
Catalogue slug
thinkingmachines-inkling-small

Machine-readable model card (omc.json) →

Something wrong on this page? Tell us