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

Inkling vs MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

Inkling scores 64.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Inkling B

Best for Agents calling a hosted open multimodal model with audio input, or teams with a multi-GPU datacentre node who want to run it themselves.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 70 against 60
  • Agent interface, 85 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 82 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.0 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

The smallest build Thinking Machines publishes needs about 710 GB, beyond any single workstation

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B C

Best for Researchers and agents that want a small coding and terminal-agent model to fine-tune further, on a 24 GB GPU or larger.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 70 against 50

Watch for

Only BF16 from Xiaomi, about 23 GB to run

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runInklingMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%255070MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B +20
Risk20%207060Inkling +10
Agent interface10%108570Inkling +15
Documentation and upkeep10%108240Inkling +42
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 64.2/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactInklingMiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThinking Machines LabXiaomi (MiMo team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT (metadata only, no LICENSE file); built on Qwen3.5-9B under Apache 2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-232026-09-21
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews3/5 (4)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

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.

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

A 9B cousin tuned on MiMo-V2.6's agent work for coding, terminal tasks and visual coding, released as a base for RL research. It needs about 23 GB in BF16, since Xiaomi ships no smaller build. The main risks are no safety results while a seventh of its tuning is offensive security, and nobody at Xiaomi answering reports.

Before you call either

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

MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

  1. Serve it as the card does, sglang serve --model-path XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Distill-Qwen-9B --reasoning-parser mimo, and add --tool-call-parser mimo for parsed tool calls
  2. SGLang's mimo reasoning parser expects thinking to be asked for, so pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true, as the card does, and read reasoning_content
  3. Calls come back as function and parameter blocks inside tool_call, the same shape vLLM's and SGLang's qwen3_coder parsers read
  4. The generation config samples at temperature 0.6, top_k 20 and top_p 0.95
  5. Images and video go in through Qwen3.5's processor; the template's audio tokens have no audio encoder behind them
  6. The MTP head isn't in the files, so skip MTP speculative decoding even though config.json lists a layer
  7. It's an SFT checkpoint meant for further RL, and discussions report runaway generation on llama.cpp, so cap max_tokens

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Inkling or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B?

Inkling scores 64.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B's 61 (C), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Inkling or MiMo-V2.6 Distill Qwen 9B

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