What Changed
Thinking Machines has officially released Inkling, a new general-purpose multimodal model. Inkling distinguishes itself by accepting text, image, and audio inputs, and producing text outputs. The model is released with open weights, targeting developers who are building AI-powered applications such as agentic systems, coding assistants, chatbots, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. It is also suitable for general conversational use and instruction-following tasks.
Inkling supports local deployment through integration with several open-source libraries, including SGLang, vLLM, TokenSpeed, Unsloth, and Hugging Face's Transformers library. API access is also provided via third-party inference providers. The model is intended for use primarily in English but possesses general multilingual capabilities.
Technical Details
Inkling is architected as a 66-layer decoder-only transformer with a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) feed-forward backbone. This architecture routes each token to 6 out of 256 experts, in addition to 2 shared experts that are active on every token. The attention mechanism is a hybrid of local and global layers.
