Inkling-Small

Inkling-Small

Thinking Machines Lab
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About

GLM-5.3-Flash is Z.ai’s natively multimodal model in the GLM-5 series (previously previewed as Ox Alpha), designed to deliver strong coding, agentic, visual, and knowledge-work performance at relatively low inference cost. It uses 320 billion total parameters with 18 billion active parameters, along with a hybrid architecture that combines sparse and linear attention to reduce the cost of long-context processing. The model supports context lengths of up to one million tokens and was trained on a 30-trillion-token multimodal corpus. GLM-5.3-Flash can reason across text, images, documents, interfaces, dashboards, and other visual information while using that feedback to refine its own outputs. Z.ai reports substantial gains over GLM-5.2 on coding and agentic benchmarks, including DeepSWE and AutomationBench, while approaching higher-cost frontier models on several evaluations.

About

Inkling-Small is an efficient model that offers performance comparable to Inkling at a quarter of its size. It is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 276 billion total parameters and 12 billion active parameters, trained on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems. It supports native reasoning across text, images, and audio, variable thinking effort, and context windows of up to one million tokens. Users adjust reasoning effort from minimal to extra high to balance performance and compute. Improved pre-training data, post-training with on-policy distillation from Inkling, and extended agentic coding reinforcement learning helped Inkling-Small surpass its larger counterpart on reasoning and coding benchmarks. It performs well in coding and tool-use harnesses, exceeds 80% on SWE-bench Verified, and combines strong reasoning with efficient output. Its encoder-free multimodal architecture processes audio as dMel spectrograms and images as 40-by-40-pixel patches alongside text tokens.

Platforms Supported

Windows
Mac
Linux
Cloud
On-Premises
iPhone
iPad
Android
Chromebook

Platforms Supported

Windows
Mac
Linux
Cloud
On-Premises
iPhone
iPad
Android
Chromebook

Audience

Developers, AI engineers, agent builders, researchers, and organizations that need cost-efficient multimodal reasoning, long-context processing, advanced coding, visual analysis, and autonomous workflow capabilities

Audience

AI researchers and developers seeking an efficient open-weight multimodal model for reasoning, agentic tasks, and lower-cost deployment

Support

Phone Support
24/7 Live Support
Online

Support

Phone Support
24/7 Live Support
Online

API

Offers API

API

Offers API

Screenshots and Videos

Screenshots and Videos

Pricing

$0.15 per 1M tokens (input)
Input: $0.15 per 1M tokens
Output: $0.50 per 1M tokens
Cached input: $0.03 per 1M tokens
Free Version
Free Trial

Pricing

$0.30 per million input tokens
$0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens
Free Version
Free Trial

Reviews/Ratings

Overall 5.0 / 5
ease 5.0 / 5

Reviews/Ratings

Overall 5.0 / 5
features 4.0 / 5

Pros & Cons from Real Users

Pros

  • What makes it exciting is that it seems built for the exact workloads developers care about right now: long-horizon coding, complex reasoning, big-context analysis, and agentic workflows. A million-token context window is especially useful if you want to drop in a large repo, long spec, research corpus, or messy project history and have the model reason across it.

Cons

  • I would treat it as something exciting to test, not something to blindly trust with sensitive work. Even the independent Ox Alpha site warns that messages are processed by the upstream model API, so I would keep secrets, private code, and customer data out of it until there is a clearer owner, model card, privacy policy, and production story.

Pros & Cons from Real Users

Pros

  • Inkling-Small is really interesting from a developer’s point of view because it hits a sweet spot between serious model capability and practical deployability. A 276B-parameter model with only 12B active parameters per token is exactly the kind of architecture that makes sense if you care about cost, speed, and scaling real AI workflows. I also like that it is open weights under Apache 2.0. That makes it way more appealing for developers who want to fine-tune, inspect, customize, or build on top of the model without being completely locked into a closed API. The multimodal support is a big plus too. Being able to work with text, images, and audio inputs gives Inkling-Small a lot of room for developer tools, coding agents, support bots, document workflows, and internal automation.

Cons

  • The main downside is that “small” here is still not tiny. Even with only 12B active parameters, this is still a large open model that will require real infrastructure if you want to host it yourself. I would also want to test it deeply before making it the backbone of a production coding agent. The model card and early coverage look promising, but real developer workflows expose problems that benchmarks do not always catch: messy repos, flaky tests, weird dependencies, tool failures, and long multi-step tasks.

Training

Documentation
Webinars
Live Online
In Person

Training

Documentation
Webinars
Live Online
In Person

Company Information

Z.ai
Founded: 2019
China
z.ai

Company Information

Thinking Machines Lab
Founded: 2025
United States
thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-small/

Alternatives

Alternatives

GPT-5.6 Sol

GPT-5.6 Sol

OpenAI
MiniMax M3

MiniMax M3

MiniMax
Inkling

Inkling

Thinking Machines Lab
Qwen3.5

Qwen3.5

Alibaba

Categories

Categories

Integrations

Cheaper Inference
Claude Code
DeepSeek Harness
GLM Coding Plan
Hermes Agent
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
OpenClaw
OpenCode Go
OpenCode Zen
OpenRouter
Pi Agent
Tinker
Z.ai
omp

Integrations

Cheaper Inference
Claude Code
DeepSeek Harness
GLM Coding Plan
Hermes Agent
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
OpenClaw
OpenCode Go
OpenCode Zen
OpenRouter
Pi Agent
Tinker
Z.ai
omp
Claim GLM-5.3-Flash and update features and information
Claim GLM-5.3-Flash and update features and information
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Claim Inkling-Small and update features and information