Inkling vs Inkling-Small: Specs & Benchmark Comparison
Inkling and Inkling-Small both come from Thinking Machines Lab, and both were released in July 2026. Inkling is the larger model at roughly 975 billion parameters, against 276 billion for Inkling-Small.
The two models share 13 published benchmarks. Inkling leads on 7 of them, Inkling-Small on 6. The widest gaps are on SimpleQA Verified, where Inkling scores 43.9% against 20.6%; Tau3 Banking, where Inkling scores 23.7% against 15.5%. Averaged across everything we track, Inkling sits at 61.8% and Inkling-Small at 60.3%.
Inkling-Small is the cheaper API at $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, roughly 3 times cheaper than Inkling at $0.95 and $4.05. Inkling takes the larger context window at 524K tokens, compared with 256K for Inkling-Small. Both accept text, images, and audio as input.
| Characteristic | Inkling | Inkling-Small |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Thinking Machines Lab | Thinking Machines Lab |
| Release Date | July 21, 2026 | July 30, 2026 |
| Parameters | 975B | 276B |
| Multimodal | Yes | Yes |
| Context (input) | 524K | 256K |
| Context (output) | 524K | 256K |
| Input Price / 1M | $0.95 | $0.30 |
| Output Price / 1M | $4.05 | $1.20 |
| Average Score | 61.8% | 60.3% |
| Benchmarks | ||
| SimpleQA Verified | 43.9% | 20.6% |
| Tau3 Banking | 23.7% | 15.5% |
| MCP Atlas | 76.0% | 79.6% |
| SWE-Bench Verified | 77.6% | 80.2% |
| IFBench | 79.8% | 82.2% |
| Global-MMLU-Lite | 88.7% | 86.7% |
| AIME 2026 | 97.1% | 95.5% |
| VoiceBench Avg | 91.4% | 90.1% |
| GDPval-AA | 41.3% | 42.3% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 63.8% | 64.7% |
| CharXiv-R | 78.1% | 77.4% |
| MMMU-Pro | 73.5% | 74.0% |
| MMAU | 77.2% | 77.0% |
Visual Benchmark Comparison
Verdict
Both models show equal results — the choice depends on your specific use case.
Both models show comparable average scores: Inkling — 0.6, Inkling-Small — 0.6.
On SWE-Bench, both models are nearly equal: Inkling — 0.8, Inkling-Small — 0.8.
Inkling-Small is 3.3x cheaper: input $0.30/1M vs $0.95/1M tokens.
Inkling supports a larger context: 524K vs 256K tokens.
Both models were released around the same time: 7/21/2026 and 7/30/2026.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better for coding — Inkling or Inkling-Small?
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Which has a larger context window — Inkling or Inkling-Small?
The Inkling and Inkling-Small comparison is updated for 2026. Data includes benchmark results, API pricing, context window size and other specifications. For more detailed information, visit the Inkling or Inkling-Small page. See also the complete list of AI model comparisons.