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

Inkling-Small B

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

CategoryWeight this runHy3Inkling-SmallEdge
Capability35%355763Inkling-Small +6
Reach25%257055Hy3 +15
Risk20%206070Inkling-Small +10
Agent interface10%107585Inkling-Small +10
Documentation and upkeep10%105682Inkling-Small +26
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 62.6/100B 66.5/100

Facts side by side

FactHy3Inkling-Small
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorTencent (Hy team)Thinking Machines Lab
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-202026-07-31
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno 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 reviews2.8/5 (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

  1. 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
  2. In SGLang use --tool-call-parser hunyuan --reasoning-parser hunyuan, as the card shows
  3. 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
  4. With the vLLM reasoning parser the chain of thought comes back in message.reasoning and the answer in message.content
  5. 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
  6. Use temperature 0.9 and top_p 1.0, the card's recommended sampling
  7. 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
  8. Without the hardware, call it through Featherless AI or DeepInfra via Hugging Face's inference providers

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

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.

Other comparisons with Hy3 or Inkling-Small

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