Inkling-Small vs Qwen3.8-27B

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.

Qwen3.8-27B

A dense cousin for coding and agent work with image and video input that runs almost anywhere. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 22 GB, and five providers host it for agents without the hardware. The main risk is that nobody at Alibaba answers, there are no safety results or agent guidance, and the tool format is only in the template.

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

Qwen3.8-27B

1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3.8, about 18 GB of files
2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, since FP8 on gfx1151 isn't documented
3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser, SGLang's cookbook says the Hermes parser leaves its calls unparsed
4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 when thinking, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
7. Preserved thinking keeps earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
8. Turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens, the card warns static YaRN can cost quality on short texts
9. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented