ClaimArticle

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 pushes back on the hype, arguing Inkling's benchmarks are mediocre and comparable to older Chinese open models, speculating the release timing was defensive. ✦ AI generated

Scaling01 · Latent Space · 2026-07-16 · original ↗

Share card ↓Export .md Export .txt

Scaling01 argued the benchmarks are 'not that great,' describing it as roughly 'another Kimi-K2.6' and behind all closed models and GLM-5.2, speculating the release may have been timed ahead of Kimi-K3 and DeepSeek-V4-GA.

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation

✳ GLM-5.2 ✳ Inkling ✳ Kimi K2.6

Around this claim

Evidence · 1

Inkling does in fact use distillation from open weights and underperforms GLM 5.2 on TerminalBench-style evals, contradicting hype that it was trained entirely without distillation.JJitsev · Latent Space · conf 60%

Counterpoint · 1

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 · Latent Space · conf 60%

This moment responds to

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