Inkling 2 Small vs Recursive Flint

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.

Recursive Flint 85

Memory 20 of 30, Recursive's MLX INT4 build is 22.6 GB, or 27.1 GB with a fifth added, which fits 32 GB, and every other 4-bit build lands in the same band. Runtimes 25 of 25, released llama.cpp (b11803), Ollama 0.40.8, LM Studio's catalogue, Transformers v5.21 and vLLM v0.33.0 run it, while SGLang has only a development image. Builds 15, MLX INT4 plus Q4_1 and NVFP4 GGUFs from Recursive. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 with nothing added. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, OpenRouter lists a free endpoint with Recursive as its provider, but it wasn't serving on 3 November 2026, with 0 per cent uptime over the last day.

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.

Recursive Flint 60

File safety 15 of 25, safetensors and GGUF only, but the card's documented BF16 route installs the wheel shipped in the repository. Provenance 15, the files are in the RecursiveSI organisation that Recursive's own engine downloads from, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 0, none on the cards or in the announcement post. Agent guidance 10, the card and serving README say to enforce permissions around tool use and to strip tool tags from untrusted tool output, but there's no trained instruction hierarchy. Licence risk 15, plain Apache 2.0. Security programme 5, a reporting address on the card and a private reporting route for the engine, with no public advisories yet.

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.

Recursive Flint 90

Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository and inside both GGUFs. Tool-calling format 25, Recursive's serving README documents how tools go in, how calls come back and the flint parser. Trained tool calling 20, several calls a turn. Structured output 15, response_format with JSON Schema is documented. Reasoning control 0, the model decides when to reason and Recursive says there's no switch or budget. Context 10, 262,144 tokens with no position scaling.