Inkling

Description

Inkling is a general-purpose multimodal autoregressive transformer model from Thinking Machines Lab Inc. that accepts text, image, and audio inputs and generates text outputs. The model is intended for English and other languages, multiple coding languages, agentic and tool-use systems, coding assistants, chatbots, retrieval-augmented generation systems, general-purpose conversational use, instruction following, and other natural language or multimodal tasks.

This model is ready for commercial or non-commercial use.

Third-Party Community Consideration:

This model is not owned or developed by NVIDIA. This model has been developed and built to a third-party's requirements for this application and use case; see link to Non-NVIDIA Inkling Model Card

License and Terms of Use:

**GOVERNING TERMS: Use of the model is governed by the NVIDIA Open Model Agreement. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Apache License, Version 2.0.

Deployment Geography:

Global

Use Case:

Use Case: Inkling is intended for developers building AI-powered applications, including agentic and tool-use systems, coding assistants, chatbots, retrieval-augmented generation systems, general-purpose conversational AI, instruction-following systems, and multimodal applications.

Release Date:

Build.NVIDIA.com: 07/15/2026 via link Huggingface: 07/15/2026 via link

Reference(s):

References:

• Inkling Model Page
• Inkling NVFP4 Model Page
• Thinking Machines Acceptable Use Policy
• Tinker Cookbook
• Inkling Tinker Documentation

Model Architecture:

Architecture Type: Transformer Network Architecture: Mixture-of-Experts Total Parameters: 975B Active Parameters: 41B

Input:

Input Types: Text, Image, Audio Input Formats: String, Red, Green, Blue (RGB), Other (Waveform) Input Parameters: One-Dimensional (1D), Two-Dimensional (2D), One-Dimensional (1D) Other Input Properties: Text input uses UTF-8 encoding; image input supports pixel-based formats with each dimension ideally between 40 and 4,096 pixels; audio input uses WAV format sampled at 16 kHz and is ideally under 20 minutes.

Output:

Output Types: Text Output Format: String Output Parameters: One-Dimensional (1D) Other Output Properties: Inkling generates UTF-8 encoded text.

Our AI models are designed and/or optimized to run on NVIDIA GPU-accelerated systems. By leveraging NVIDIA's hardware (e.g. GPU cores) and software frameworks (e.g., CUDA libraries), the model achieves faster training and inference times compared to CPU-only solutions.

Software Integration:

Runtime Engines:

• SGLang
• vLLM

Supported Hardware:

• NVIDIA Blackwell: B300
• NVIDIA Hopper: H200

Preferred Operating Systems: Linux

The integration of foundation and fine-tuned models into AI systems requires additional testing using use-case-specific data to ensure safe and effective deployment. Following the V-model methodology, iterative testing and validation at both unit and system levels are essential to mitigate risks, meet technical and functional requirements, and ensure compliance with safety and ethical standards before deployment.

Model Version(s)

Inkling v1.0

Training, Testing, and Evaluation Datasets:

Training Dataset

Data Modality: Text, Image, Audio, Video Text Training Data Size: Undisclosed Image Training Data Size: Undisclosed Audio Training Data Size: Undisclosed Video Training Data Size: Undisclosed Training Data Collection: Hybrid: Automated, Manually-Collected, Synthetic Training Labeling: Undisclosed Training Properties: Training data includes a broad variety of content types, including text, images, audio, and video, drawn from publicly available sources, third-party acquired sources, and synthetically generated or augmented data. The training data curation process includes cleaning, processing, modification, deduplication, filtering, and other data-type-specific processing steps to remove low-quality content or advance safety objectives.

Testing Dataset

Testing Data Collection: Undisclosed Testing Labeling: Undisclosed Testing Properties: Undisclosed

Evaluation Dataset

Evaluation Benchmark Score: Inkling reports reasoning, agentic, factuality, chat, vision, audio, and safety benchmark results at effort=0.99. Selected official Hugging Face scores include 46.0% HLE with tools, 97.1% AIME 2026, 77.6% SWEBench Verified, 54.3% SWEBench Pro (Public), 63.8 Terminal Bench 2.1, 88.7% Global-MMLU-Lite, 73.3% MMMU Pro (Standard 10), 91.4% VoiceBench, and 98.6% StrongREJECT.

Detailed benchmark comparison tables are available in the official Inkling Model Card.

Evaluation Data Collection: Hybrid: Automated, Manually-Collected Evaluation Labeling: Hybrid: Automated, Manually-Labeled Evaluation Properties: The evaluation suite covers reasoning, coding and agentic tasks, factuality, chat and instruction following, multimodal vision and audio tasks, and safety benchmarks, with results reported at effort=0.99 and comparison scores from the r/acc leaderboard generated July 14, 2026.

Inference

Acceleration Engine: SGLang + Dynamo Test Hardware: NVIDIA Blackwell (GB200)

Additional Details

Inkling may exhibit general limitations common to foundation models, including hallucination, occasional failures to follow instructions precisely, degraded performance in long multi-turn conversations, demographic, cultural, or linguistic bias, and uneven performance across languages, dialects, or subject domains that were less represented during training. Downstream developers and deployers should apply human oversight for high-stakes or safety-critical contexts, conduct use-case-specific evaluation, and implement application-layer safeguards such as content filtering, rate limiting, monitoring, and input/output moderation.

Safety evaluations were conducted ahead of release across everyday human-AI interaction and dangerous-capability testing. Evaluation areas included sycophancy, harmful manipulation, psychological-harm patterns, refusal behavior, CBRN, cyber, loss of control, agentic capability, strategic deception, sabotage potential, internal evaluations, external testing, open-ended external red teaming, and refusal-suppressed variants to estimate latent capability with safeguards removed. For more information on model safety, please view the Inkling Model Card.

Ethical Considerations

NVIDIA believes Trustworthy AI is a shared responsibility and we have established policies and practices to enable development for a wide array of AI applications. Developers should work with their internal model team to ensure this model meets requirements for the relevant industry and use case and addresses unforeseen product misuse.

Please make sure you have proper rights and permissions for all input image content; if image includes people, personal health information, or intellectual property, the image generated will not blur or maintain proportions of image subjects included.

Please report model quality, risk, security vulnerabilities or NVIDIA AI Concerns here.

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