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Inkling is a clear step up from Nemotron Ultra and the new best American open model, though still a bit behind GLM 5.2 on agentic benchmarks and Kimi K2.6 on multimodal tasks.

Nathan Lambert judges Inkling as the leading U.S. open model to date, while noting it still trails top Chinese open models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.6 on specific capabilities. ✦ AI generated

Nathan Lambert · Latent Space · 2026-07-16 · original ↗

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Natolambert called it a 'clear step up from Nemotron Ultra' and 'new best American model,' but still 'a bit behind GLM 5.2 on agentic benchies, and Kimi K 2.6 on multi modal'.

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✳ GLM-5.2 ✳ Inkling ✳ Kimi K2.6

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Evidence · 1

Inkling debuts at 41 on the Intelligence Index, making it the leading U.S. open-weights release, ahead of Nemotron 3 Ultra (38), Gemma 4 31B (29), and gpt-oss-120b (24).Artificial Analysis · Latent Space · conf 65%

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extends → Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's first general model: fully open-weight, 975B total parameters, natively multimodal, and available on Tinker, Hugging Face, and partner platforms.Soumith Chintala · Latent Space rebuts → Inkling's benchmark results are not that great, effectively amounting to 'another Kimi-K2.6', behind all closed models and GLM-5.2, and possibly rushed out ahead of Kimi-K3 and DeepSeek-V4-GA.Scaling01 · Latent Space