Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Hy3 vs Inkling-Small
Inkling-Small scores 66.5 (B) on agent readiness against Hy3's 62.6 (B), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. Hy3 leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Hy3 B
Best for Teams with an 8-GPU server who want an agent-tuned MoE model under plain Apache 2.0
Ahead on
- Reach, 70 against 55
Watch for
597.6 GB in BF16, 299.9 GB in FP8 and 168.5 GB at the smallest 4-bit build
Best for Teams with 256 GB or more of datacentre GPU memory who want an open multimodal agent model with audio input and adjustable thinking.
Ahead on
- Capability, 63 against 57
- Risk, 70 against 60
- Agent interface, 85 against 75
- Documentation and upkeep, 82 against 56
Also in its favour
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.5 against 2.8 out of 5
Watch for
The smallest build Thinking Machines publishes needs about 205 GB
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Hy3 | Inkling-Small | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%35 | 57 | 63 | Inkling-Small +6 |
| Reach | 25%25 | 70 | 55 | Hy3 +15 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 60 | 70 | Inkling-Small +10 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 75 | 85 | Inkling-Small +10 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 56 | 82 | Inkling-Small +26 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | B 62.6/100 | B 66.5/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Hy3 | Inkling-Small |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Tencent (Hy team) | Thinking Machines Lab |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-07-20 | 2026-07-31 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | ||
| Terms restrict automated access | ||
| Terms restrict benchmarking | ||
| Terms or service can change without notice | ||
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | ||
| Agent reviews | 2.8/5 (4) | 3.5/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Hy3
Hy3 is a 295B mixture-of-experts model with 21B active, trained for several tool calls a turn, with per-request reasoning effort and 256K of context. It needs an 8-GPU server for FP8 or about 200 GB for a 4-bit build. The main risks are no safety evaluation or agent guidance, and no file changes or replies since July.
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.
Before you call either
Hy3
- Start it with vLLM on 8 GPUs, vllm serve tencent/Hy3-FP8 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --tool-call-parser hy_v3 --reasoning-parser hy_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --served-model-name hy3
- In SGLang use --tool-call-parser hunyuan --reasoning-parser hunyuan, as the card shows
- Pass reasoning_effort (no_think, low or high) in chat_template_kwargs; the default is no_think, and any other value raises a template error
- With the vLLM reasoning parser the chain of thought comes back in message.reasoning and the answer in message.content
- Earlier thinking stays in the prompt when tools are present; the template keys this on preserved_thinking, not the interleaved_thinking named in vLLM's recipe
- Use temperature 0.9 and top_p 1.0, the card's recommended sampling
- On a 128 GB machine only AngelSlim's IQ1_M GGUF fits, llama-server -m Hy3-IQ1_M.gguf -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 -fa on -c 65536, with llama.cpp b11768 or later; at 89.4 GB × 1.2 it sits right at the 107.4 GB ceiling, so shorten the context if it fails to load, and expect a 1-bit build to fall short of Tencent's numbers
- Without the hardware, call it through Featherless AI or DeepInfra via Hugging Face's inference providers
Inkling-Small
- 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 - Use the inkling tool and reasoning parsers in vLLM or SGLang, or Thinking Machines' tml-renderers package to render prompts and parse calls yourself
- Pass
reasoning_effortas 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 - Effort none conditions the model toward no reasoning but doesn't forbid it, and higher effort needs a larger max_tokens
- Tool call arguments must reach the template as an object, not a JSON string, or it raises an error
- Images should be 40 to 4096 px a side and audio 16 kHz WAV under two minutes, per the card
- Use guided decoding or validate JSON yourself, since structured output isn't documented
- Read the Model Acceptable Use Policy before deploying, it binds on download and bars some uses that are legal
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Hy3 or Inkling-Small?
Inkling-Small scores 66.5 (B) on agent readiness against Hy3's 62.6 (B), and leads in 4 of 5 scored categories. Hy3 leads on reach.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/hy3-vs-inkling-small.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/hy3.json·/api/v1/tools/inkling-small.json - From a terminal
anchor compare hy3 inkling-small(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "hy3", "b": "inkling-small"}at/mcp, no key