Inkling vs LBS-27B

Inkling

Thinking Machines' large multimodal generalist, stronger than Inkling-Small on factual recall by its own numbers. It needs about 710 GB of datacentre GPU memory even in NVFP4, so most agents will use a host such as Together AI or Tinker. The main risks are a use policy that binds on download and can change, and no outside safety results.

LBS-27B

A 27B Qwen3.8 fine-tune for GUI grounding that zooms into screenshots over a few turns before naming a point, and inclusionAI says it also helps with fine detail in large images. It needs about 96 GB at BF16 and a client that runs its crop actions. Every result so far is inclusionAI's own, with no safety results or injection guidance.

Inkling

1. Unless you have a multi-GPU Blackwell or H200 node, call it through Together AI, Fireworks, DeepInfra or Tinker rather than starting it
2. On 8 B200 GPUs, SGLang's recipe is sglang serve --trust-remote-code --model-path thinkingmachines/Inkling-NVFP4 --tp 8 --quantization modelopt_fp4 --enable-multimodal --reasoning-parser inkling --tool-call-parser inkling
3. Use the inkling tool parser, not Hermes, and the inkling reasoning parser
4. 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 list xhigh
5. Tool call arguments must reach the template as an object, not a JSON string, or it raises an error
6. Audio should be 16 kHz WAV, ideally under 20 minutes, and images 40 to 4096 px a side, per the card
7. Read the Model Acceptable Use Policy before deploying, it binds on download and bars some uses that are legal

LBS-27B

1. Serve with vllm serve inclusionAI/LBS-27B --tensor-parallel-size 4 --max-model-len 65536, which is what the card's wrapper script runs; keep the context at 32,768 or more for multi-turn images
2. Build the system prompt with build_system_prompt from the LBS branch's zoomin_grounding_protocol.py, send the screenshot after image_path: <name>, and don't pass tools; the model answers in plain text
3. Parse <action>crop_image(image_path=..., x1=..., y1=..., x2=..., y2=...)</action>, cut the crop yourself and return it with its mapping to the original image; allow at most two crops per turn and three per episode
4. Read the final answer as [x.xx,y.yy] on a 0 to 1000 scale of the original image, and use your own executor to click
5. Pass reasoning_effort as xhigh, medium or low only, since the template raises an error for high, and don't count on thinking_budget, which the template ignores
6. Don't turn on MTP speculative decoding; the MTP weights aren't in the repository though config.json names one MTP layer