Introducing Inkling: A Powerful Open-Weights Multimodal AI Model
Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model
We are releasing Inkling, a new open-weights model trained from scratch to reason across text, images, and audio. With 975 billion total parameters and a one-million token context window, Inkling balances performance with cost through controllable thinking effort. Designed as a broad generalist foundation rather than a narrow specialist, it is available for fine-tuning on our Tinker platform to help developers build customized AI solutions.
It is not the most performant model available today, closed or open; we trained Inkling for solid capabilities across the board rather than state-of-the-art performance in a single area.
- segmondy
Very nice, multi modal, largest open weight model that supports audio. Would be interesting to see how good the audio capability is.
If you want to run locally, checkout
https://github.com/danielhanchen/llama.cpp/tree/add-inkling
https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/inkling
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/inkling-GGUF
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/inkling-NVFP4
This supposedly is better than KimiK2.7, as much hype as GLM5.2 gets, I find myself using KimiK2.7 half of the time, so if the benchmark is true, then this can definitely go in the mix. My hope is that it might have strengths in some areas to beat all other open weight models.
- ls_stats
America needs its own DeepSeek or Z.ai, a lot of people (myself included) root for open chinese models to win because they have no other choice.
Thinking Machines might be it.
- wxw
> Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed. Instead, a combination of qualities makes it a good open-weights base for customization: multimodal capabilities, efficient thinking, and availability on Tinker for fine-tuning.
Open base models that can be fine tuned on Tinker is a great business model IMO. You (i.e. an enterprise) can own your own model & have it perform frontier-or-better at your task at potentially much lower cost and Thinking Machines gets to be your essential infra/service provider in this world.
Also,
> Inkling-Small matches or exceeds its larger sibling on many benchmarks — the result of improvements we made to the pre-training data and recipe for the smaller model.
Very cool! Excited to see the next generations of Thinky models.
- simonw
Here's a pelican: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
- aabhay
What strikes me the most is just how many different tasks are involved in modern model design. It used to be the case that you come up with a new loss function, slight architecture changes, etc., run your train and eval loop, and publish the artifacts.
Now, there’s so much work to do just to keep up. It’s the ultimate red queen race. All of the 500 steps involved, each of which is its own little optimization loop, is sort of awe inspiring.
But obviously this inverts the previous rules that small teams run faster than big teams. AI requires a big team. It’s only once the team pushes past the 1000s that organizational inertia seems to become an issue. Because until then, there’s way too many pieces for even a dozen super stars.
- Topfi
Very preliminary testing so far, but there is something here, far beyond what the benchmarks suggest. Only ever saw such outperformance of public evals vs my private ones with Anthropic models and while it is far to early to make any judgement at this stage, this model will take up a lot of mine time in the coming weeks by the look of things. Only ever viewed Moonshot AIs models as something I'd be able to live with open-weight-wise (Z.AIs output simply does not perform as well in my task set), but this has the potential to be the second. If Mistral came out with something like this, I suspect every Europhile (me included) would never stop talking about it.
- minraws
For a first model, and given it's open, I am gaining some faith in American Open research labs again...
I couldn't test it since it's not on openrouter or something, but even if it's only as good as GLM5.1 that's more than good enough first attempt, I think.
Perhaps a lot more labs will catch up to ballpark frontier esque level soon, I am all for more competition in any field.
- ianbutler
It's nice to see a strong long context open weights model that is multi-modal.
There are many applications that will benefit from the strength in audio here and until z.ai and co work in visual this could be very strong for general agentic applications, though I see there's a bit of weakness in the benches for areas that might make that less true.
Like all models need to slap it in your harness and do proper evals on the tasks you care about.