Inkling-Small

Inkling-Small

Thinking Machines Lab
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About

Gemini 4 Argon is a frontier artificial intelligence model developed by Google DeepMind for complex reasoning, software engineering, cybersecurity, and professional knowledge work. The model supports multimodal inputs, including text, images, audio, video, and PDF documents, with a unified context window of approximately one million tokens. Its advanced reasoning capabilities enable it to analyze difficult problems, maintain context across lengthy workflows, and execute multistep tasks. Gemini 4 Argon supports autonomous AI agents, code generation, application development, scientific research, and analysis of legal and financial information. Developer capabilities include function calling, code execution, structured outputs, search grounding, and preview support for computer use. The model is available through the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Google Antigravity, and supported Gemini applications and enterprise services.

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 Not Supported
Mac Not Supported
Linux Not Supported
Cloud Supported
On-Premises Not Supported
iPhone Not Supported
iPad Not Supported
Android Not Supported
Chromebook Not Supported

Platforms Supported

Windows Not Supported
Mac Not Supported
Linux Not Supported
Cloud Supported
On-Premises Not Supported
iPhone Not Supported
iPad Not Supported
Android Not Supported
Chromebook Not Supported

Audience

Software developers, engineers, AI teams, cybersecurity professionals, financial and legal professionals, researchers, enterprises, and other advanced users that need frontier AI for complex reasoning, long-horizon coding, knowledge work, multimodal analysis, and multi-step agentic workflows

Audience

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

Support

Phone Support Not Supported
24/7 Live Support Not Supported
Online Supported

Support

Phone Support Not Supported
24/7 Live Support Not Supported
Online Supported

API

Offers API Supported

API

Offers API Supported

Screenshots and Videos

Screenshots and Videos

Pricing

$2 per 1M tokens (input)
$2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.
Free Version Not Supported
Free Trial Not Supported

Pricing

$0.30 per million input tokens
$0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens
Free Version Not Supported
Free Trial Not Supported

Reviews/Ratings

Overall 5.0 / 5
ease 5.0 / 5
features 5.0 / 5
design 5.0 / 5
support 5.0 / 5

Reviews/Ratings

Overall 5.0 / 5
features 4.0 / 5

Pros & Cons from Real Users

Pros

  • I can give it a large coding problem, a long research task, or something involving multiple tools and it does a much better job keeping the goal in view instead of slowly wandering off course. Coding is especially strong. Google reports 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1 and 91.9% on Vibe Code Bench, and it feels very comfortable with repo-level work, multi-file changes, debugging, and longer agent loops. The 1M-token context window is also genuinely useful. I can keep a huge amount of code, documentation, logs, PDFs, and prior work in the same session without constantly trimming context. I also like the tool support. Computer use, code execution, search grounding, file search, function calling, and URL context make Argon feel much more like an agent model than a normal chatbot.

Cons

  • The main downside is that it is overkill for simple tasks. I would still use Flash for quick coding help, lightweight automation, or anything where speed and cost matter more than maximum reasoning depth.

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 Supported
Webinars Not Supported
Live Online Not Supported
In Person Not Supported

Training

Documentation Supported
Webinars Not Supported
Live Online Not Supported
In Person Not Supported

Company Information

Google
Founded: 1998
United States
gemini.com

Company Information

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

Alternatives

Alternatives

Inkling

Inkling

Thinking Machines Lab
Beam

Beam

Reflection

Categories

AI Coding Models Supported
AI Models Supported
AI Vision Models Supported
Foundation Models Supported
Multimodal Models Supported

Categories

AI Coding Models Supported
AI Models Supported
AI Vision Models Supported

Integrations

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Supported
C# Supported
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite Supported
Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber Supported
Gemini Managed Agents Supported
Go Supported
Google AI Overviews Supported
Google AI Plus Supported
Google AI Ultra Supported
Java Supported
OfoxAI Supported
Python Supported
R Supported
Replit Supported
Ruby Supported
Rust Supported
Solidity Supported
Tinker Not Supported
Vercel AI Gateway Supported
XML Supported

Integrations

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Supported
C# Not Supported
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite Not Supported
Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber Not Supported
Gemini Managed Agents Not Supported
Go Not Supported
Google AI Overviews Not Supported
Google AI Plus Not Supported
Google AI Ultra Not Supported
Java Not Supported
OfoxAI Not Supported
Python Not Supported
R Not Supported
Replit Not Supported
Ruby Not Supported
Rust Not Supported
Solidity Not Supported
Tinker Supported
Vercel AI Gateway Not Supported
XML Not Supported
Claim Gemini 4 Argon and update features and information
Claim Gemini 4 Argon and update features and information
Claim Inkling-Small and update features and information
Claim Inkling-Small and update features and information