Inkling-Small vs LFM3-1.7B

Inkling-Small 55

Memory 5 of 30, the smallest 4-bit build is Thinking Machines' NVFP4 at 170.8 GB, about 205 GB with a fifth added, so it needs 256 GB. Runtimes 15, released Transformers, vLLM and SGLang run it, llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio don't. Builds 10, one quantised build (NVFP4). 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 DeepInfra is live on Hugging Face.

LFM3-1.7B 85

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB, and 1.10 GB × 1.2 = 1.3 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture (src/models/lfm3.cpp at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3 entry, and LM Studio's catalogue runs the architecture (its liquid/lfm3-vl-2b entry; lmstudio-community publishes a GGUF of this model). Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-1.7b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.

Inkling-Small 70

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 and FORTRESS results and described external red-teaming, but nothing an outside party published or a harness to rerun. Agent guidance 10, the card says what its refusals miss and which safeguards to add, 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.

LFM3-1.7B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

Inkling-Small 87

Model card 17 of 20, everything but a dated knowledge cut-off, counting Thinking Machines' own model card page. Training data 15, an EU training-content summary with sources, mix, a July 2026 collection cut-off and filtering. Last change 20, the files last changed on 31 July 2026, but Thinking Machines' Inkling renderer in tinker-cookbook changed in its 30 October 2026 release. Responsiveness 20, Thinking Machines answered 8 of the 9 questions in its discussions. Version policy 5, a first release. File health 10, the files agree and no broken-file report waits. 17+15+20+20+5+10 = 87.

LFM3-1.7B 67

Model card 17, Intended use (local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, fine-tuning), a limitation (not recommended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning), architecture (24 layers: 13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window and 6 global attention), parameters (1.73B), context (256K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: 22T tokens of pre-training in two stages with the kinds of data added since LFM2, 1.75T tokens of supervised fine-tuning, then mixed reinforcement learning, distillation from six specialist teachers and agentic reinforcement learning. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 10, Of the 22 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 8 November 2026), 7 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is some. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3 architecture, the 262,144-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 67.

Inkling-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, 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 the maximum, and the reasoning comes back in reasoning_content. Context 10, up to 1M tokens.

LFM3-1.7B 100

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says the model was trained on tool calls and agentic traces and with reinforcement learning inside agent harnesses. Structured output 15, Liquid's API guide documents response_format with a JSON Schema, with lfm3-1.7b as the model in its examples, and says the schema is checked before generation starts. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking=False in the chat template to turn reasoning off per request, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, which says the mid-training stage extended the context window to 256K, and max_position_embeddings 262144 in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 100.