GLM-4.7-Flash vs Inkling-Small

GLM-4.7-Flash

A small MIT-licensed mixture-of-experts model with about 3B active parameters, for local agent and coding work with several tool calls per turn and optional thinking. It runs in Ollama at about 23 GB and in nearly every common runtime. The main risk is neglect, with no changes or replies since early February and no safety results.

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.

GLM-4.7-Flash

1. On our reference machine start it with vllm serve zai-org/GLM-4.7-Flash --max-model-len 65536 --tool-call-parser glm47 --reasoning-parser glm45 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name glm-4.7-flash
2. Or run ollama run glm-4.7-flash for the 19 GB q4_K_M build
3. Without the glm47 and glm45 parsers, tool calls and reasoning come back as plain text
4. Use a released vLLM (0.32.0 or later) or SGLang (0.5.22 or later); the card's nightly and pull-request builds date from January 2026
5. Pass chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for short tasks, since thinking is on by default
6. Set clear_thinking: false to keep earlier reasoning in multi-turn agent work, as Z.ai does for τ²-Bench and Terminal Bench
7. Set the context length yourself, since config.json allows 202,752 tokens and tokenizer_config.json says 128,000

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