DeepSeek-V3.2 vs Inkling

DeepSeek-V3.2

DeepSeek-V3.2 is an MIT-licensed reasoning model trained for parallel tool calls, with thinking chosen per request, for long agent work. It needs about 690 GB of FP8 files, eight 80 GB GPUs in vLLM's recipe and prompts built from DeepSeek's Python. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes since December 2025 and no safety evaluation.

Inkling

Thinking Machines' large multimodal generalist, stronger than Inkling-Small on factual recall by its own numbers. It needs about 710 GB of datacentre GPU memory even in NVFP4, so most agents will use a host such as Together AI or Tinker. The main risks are a use policy that binds on download and can change, and no outside safety results.

DeepSeek-V3.2

1. Start it with vLLM's recipe, vllm serve deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tokenizer-mode deepseek_v32 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser deepseek_v32 --reasoning-parser deepseek_v3
2. It doesn't fit the 107.4 GB reference machine at any qualifying build, so call DeepInfra (deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2) or SambaNova (DeepSeek-V3.2) instead
3. Outside vLLM, build prompts with encoding/encoding_dsv32.py and wrap parse_message_from_completion_text in error handling, since DeepSeek says it handles well-formed output only
4. Pick thinking or chat with thinking_mode, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
5. Send developer messages only for search-agent prompts, the only use DeepSeek gives that role
6. Use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 and keep prompts within 128K tokens

Inkling

1. Unless you have a multi-GPU Blackwell or H200 node, call it through Together AI, Fireworks, DeepInfra or Tinker rather than starting it
2. On 8 B200 GPUs, SGLang's recipe is sglang serve --trust-remote-code --model-path thinkingmachines/Inkling-NVFP4 --tp 8 --quantization modelopt_fp4 --enable-multimodal --reasoning-parser inkling --tool-call-parser inkling
3. Use the inkling tool parser, not Hermes, and the inkling reasoning parser
4. 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 list xhigh
5. Tool call arguments must reach the template as an object, not a JSON string, or it raises an error
6. Audio should be 16 kHz WAV, ideally under 20 minutes, and images 40 to 4096 px a side, per the card
7. Read the Model Acceptable Use Policy before deploying, it binds on download and bars some uses that are legal