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Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Inkling 2 Small vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Inkling 2 Small's 58.8 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Inkling 2 Small leads on risk, agent interface and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6472 open weights comparisons

Inkling 2 SmallThinking Machines Lab · Open-weight model C58.8/100#102 of 161 open-weight models Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2Jackrong · Open-weight model C61/100#53 of 161 open-weight models

Which one, for what

Inkling 2 Small C

Best for Teams with 512 GB or more of datacentre GPU memory who want Thinking Machines' newest open multimodal agent model and can run a runtime's pre-release image.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 50
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 51

Watch for

The smaller checkpoint needs about 472 GB, and Thinking Machines says 500 GB of GPU memory

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 C

Best for Hobbyist and research agents that want a Qwen3.8-27B tuned for shorter reasoning, for local coding loops on a 24 GB GPU.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 40

Watch for

Published from a personal account, with no organisation, security contact or safety evaluation

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reach Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 +45

Inkling 2 Small 40

Memory 0 of 30, the smallest build is Thinking Machines' NVFP4 checkpoint at 393.5 GB, about 472 GB with a fifth added, above the 256 GB line. Runtimes 0, no released version of the six runs it; vLLM and SGLang serve it from their own images and Transformers has it on its main branch only. Builds 15, two precisions from the publisher (NVFP4 and MXFP8). Terms 10, Apache 2.0 with a binding acceptable use policy on top, read as a custom licence. Download 10, no gate. Hosted 5, Thinking Machines' own Tinker serves it as beta serverless inference, and Together is live on Hugging Face. 0 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 40.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 85

Memory 25 of 30, Jackrong's IQ4_XS GGUF is 15.4 GB, about 18.5 GB with a fifth added, which fits 24 GB. Runtimes 20, it keeps Qwen3.8-27B's architecture, which released vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp run, while Ollama's entry is the base's, not this model's. Builds 15, GGUFs at many precisions from 4-bit to 8-bit and BF16. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 through the chain. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, no provider serves it.

Agent interface Inkling 2 Small +25

Inkling 2 Small 85

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, Thinking Machines' tml-renderers guide shows how tools are declared and how calls come back for this model, and its package ships the parser. Trained tool calling 20, several calls in one turn. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 10, thinking effort is set per request from none to xhigh, and the reasoning comes back in reasoning_content. Context 10, up to 1M tokens. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 60

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 10 of 25, only the template shows the Hermes-style JSON calls, which differ from the base's format. Trained tool calling 20, several calls a turn. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, the switches are documented but not where the reasoning comes back. Context 10, 262,144 tokens from the base.

Documentation and upkeep Inkling 2 Small +16

Inkling 2 Small 67

Model card 17 of 20, everything but a dated knowledge cut-off. Training data 15, an EU training-content summary with sources, mix, an October 2026 collection cut-off and filtering. Last change 20, the files were uploaded on 12 November 2026. Responsiveness 0, the repository has no questions yet, which reads as none answered. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 10, the files agree and no broken-file report waits. 17 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 67.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 51

Model card 11 of 20, missing architecture, context and a cut-off. Training data 5, a description with no cut-off. Last change 15, the files went up on 21 September 2026, 43 days ago, with no commit since. Responsiveness 10, Jackrong answered 2 of 8 discussions across the model's two repositories. Version policy 5, the first Flash release stays up without a dated note. File health 5, no LICENSE file, an experiment note in the template and open reports of looping and a grammar failure.

Risk Inkling 2 Small +15

Inkling 2 Small 65

File safety 25, safetensors only and no repository code to run. Provenance 15, the files are in the organisation Thinking Machines links to, with a SHA-256 on every LFS file. Safety evaluation 10, Thinking Machines' own StrongREJECT, FORTRESS, HoneyBench and DistressBench results and described outside red-teaming, but nothing an outside party published or a harness to rerun. Agent guidance 5, the card names safeguards to add but doesn't say what its refusals cover, with nothing on prompt injection. Licence risk 5, 10 off for a use policy that reaches beyond the law and that can change at any time. Security programme 5, a security.txt and a disclosure policy, with public advisories unchecked and scored as absent. 25 + 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 65.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 50

File safety 25, safetensors and GGUF only, nothing from the repository runs. Provenance 5 of 15, the files are on a personal account with no site or organisation behind it, though every file has a checksum. Safety evaluation 0, the card says none was done. Agent guidance 5, general cautions about loops and tool reliability. Licence risk 15, plain Apache 2.0. Security programme 0, no contact or policy.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runInkling 2 SmallQwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%254085Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 +45
Risk20%206550Inkling 2 Small +15
Agent interface10%108560Inkling 2 Small +25
Documentation and upkeep10%106751Inkling 2 Small +16
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 58.8/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactInkling 2 SmallQwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThinking Machines LabJackrong
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Apache-2.0 (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.8-27B under Apache 2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-122026-09-21
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviewsnone2.5/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Inkling 2 Small

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

Verdicts

Inkling 2 Small

Thinking Machines' newest open model, a 594B mixture-of-experts generalist with images in, several tool calls a turn and per-request thinking effort. The NVFP4 checkpoint needs about 472 GB, and no released runtime runs it yet, so today that means vLLM's or SGLang's own images, or Tinker and Together hosted. The use policy binds on download and can change.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

A Qwen3.8-27B cousin tuned to think less per turn in long agent loops, with an MTP head for speculative decoding in llama.cpp. It fits 24 GB with Jackrong's 4-bit GGUF. The risks are one person's experimental release with no safety work, training traces taken from Claude and GPT, and a tool format that differs from Qwen's.

Before you call either

Inkling 2 Small

  1. No released runtime runs it yet. Serve the NVFP4 checkpoint from SGLang's dev-inkling-2-small image with the cookbook's recipe for your hardware, or from vLLM's vllm/vllm-openai:inkling-2-small image
  2. In vLLM pass --reasoning-parser inkling --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser inkling. In SGLang the tool-call parser is inkling2 and the reasoning parser inkling
  3. Transformers' main branch loads only thinkingmachines/Inkling-2-Small-MXFP8, the 622.8 GB checkpoint, and no release has the code yet
  4. Pass reasoning_effort as none, minimal, low, medium, high (the default), xhigh or max, or a number from 0 to 0.99
  5. Effort none conditions the model toward no reasoning but doesn't forbid it, and higher effort needs a larger max_tokens
  6. Tool call arguments must reach the template as an object, not a JSON string, or it raises an error
  7. Images should be 40 to 4096 px a side. The model takes no audio, and the template raises an error for an audio part
  8. Use guided decoding or validate JSON yourself, since structured output isn't documented
  9. Without the hardware, call it on Tinker's OpenAI-compatible endpoint with a Tinker key, at $0.30 input and $1.00 output per million tokens as read on 6 November 2026
  10. Read the Model Acceptable Use Policy before deploying, it binds on download and bars some uses that are legal

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

  1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 17 GB, and add mmproj-F32.gguf for images
  2. The card's tests used Q5_K_M with the bundled MTP head and --spec-type draft-mtp in llama.cpp
  3. The template asks for tool calls as JSON inside tool_call tags, so use a Hermes-style parser (vLLM's hermes), not Qwen3.8's qwen3_coder
  4. For coding the card recommends enable_thinking true, reasoning_effort xhigh and temperature 0.3, which you must pass yourself, since generation_config.json says 1.0
  5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
  6. Earlier reasoning stays in the context unless preserve_thinking is false
  7. Cap max_tokens, since a report says it loops more than V1

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Inkling 2 Small or Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2?

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Inkling 2 Small's 58.8 (C), and leads in 1 of 4 scored categories. Inkling 2 Small leads on risk, agent interface and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Inkling 2 Small or Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

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