Carbon-X vs Inkling-Small

Carbon-X

A DNA specialist cousin that another agent calls for variant-effect and sequence questions, with DNA kept on the machine. Hugging Face's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 12 GB and Q8_0 about 19 GB, on llama.cpp b11742 or later. It isn't clinically validated, it isn't trained for tool calls or reasoning, and the card contradicts its own GGUF repository on llama.cpp support.

Inkling-Small

A mixture-of-experts generalist with images and audio in, several tool calls a turn and per-request thinking effort. It needs about 205 GB for Thinking Machines' NVFP4 build on recent NVIDIA or AMD datacentre GPUs, and Tinker or DeepInfra host it. The main risks are a use policy that binds on download and can change, and no outside safety results.

Carbon-X

1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X-GGUF:Q8_0 -ngl 99 -c 40960 --jinja --chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": false}' --temp 0.6 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, on llama.cpp b11742 or later
2. With vLLM or Transformers pass trust_remote_code, and expect the tokenizer to fetch Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Base at a pinned revision on first load
3. Keep enable_thinking false and the card's sampling (temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20), the settings every reported result used
4. Keep DNA in files and pass sequences by name, compute positions and base changes in code and send them as context, the card says the model miscounts long sequences
5. Only A, C, G and T form 6-mers, so filter N and other IUPAC codes first or they become a single oov token
6. Strip the dna tags from answers if you need bare sequence, llama.cpp keeps them in the text
7. Cap max_tokens for next-base questions, long DNA generation is slow and degrades

Inkling-Small

1. Start the NVFP4 build with SGLang's recipe, sglang serve --trust-remote-code --model-path thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small-NVFP4 --tp 8 --enable-multimodal --reasoning-parser inkling --tool-call-parser inkling, on Blackwell for W4A4
2. Use the inkling tool and reasoning parsers in vLLM or SGLang, or Thinking Machines' tml-renderers package to render prompts and parse calls yourself
3. Pass reasoning_effort as none, minimal, low, medium, high (the default) or max, or a number from 0 to 0.99. The repository's template has no xhigh preset and raises an error for it, though Thinking Machines' docs and SGLang's cookbook list xhigh
4. Effort none conditions the model toward no reasoning but doesn't forbid it, and higher effort needs a larger max_tokens
5. Tool call arguments must reach the template as an object, not a JSON string, or it raises an error
6. Images should be 40 to 4096 px a side and audio 16 kHz WAV under two minutes, per the card
7. Use guided decoding or validate JSON yourself, since structured output isn't documented
8. Read the Model Acceptable Use Policy before deploying, it binds on download and bars some uses that are legal