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

Inkling vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

Inkling scores 64.2 (B) on agent readiness against Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning's 60.7 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning leads on reach and agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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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

  • Capability, 60 against 34
  • Risk, 70 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 82 against 65

Watch for

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

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning C

Best for Agents with a 32 to 48 GB NVIDIA GPU that need one local model to read video, audio, documents and screens and call tools

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 50
  • Agent interface, 90 against 85

Watch for

Loads with trust_remote_code in every documented runtime command

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runInklingNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B ReasoningEdge
Capability35%356034Inkling +26
Reach25%255085Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +35
Risk20%207060Inkling +10
Agent interface10%108590Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +5
Documentation and upkeep10%108265Inkling +17
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 64.2/100C 60.7/100

Facts side by side

FactInklingNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorThinking Machines LabNVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0NVIDIA Open Model Agreement (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-07-232026-08-24
Terms last updatedno 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)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.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

A local multimodal cousin for video with speech, long documents, charts, screens and English transcription, with tool calling, a reasoning switch and a 262,144-token context. It needs about 27 GB for NVIDIA's NVFP4 build on Blackwell, or 42 GB for FP8. The main risks are the remote code it loads and a repository where nobody answers questions.

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

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

  1. Start it with vllm serve nvidia/Nemotron-3-Nano-Omni-30B-A3B-Reasoning-FP8 --max-model-len 131072 --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --kv-cache-dtype fp8 on vLLM 0.20.0 or later, after pip install "vllm[audio]" if any audio will be sent
  2. Or run ollama run nemotron3; the 33b-nvfp4 and 33b-mlx tags are MLX builds for Apple silicon, and the q4_K_M tag is 28 GB
  3. Set --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"fps": 2, "num_frames": 256}}' at launch, since vLLM otherwise samples about 32 frames per video
  4. Send chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for transcription and quick answers, and use temperature 1.0 with top_k 1 for ASR as the card recommends
  5. Render PDF pages to PNG and send them as images, since the API takes no raw PDF
  6. Treat transcripts and text read from images or video as untrusted input before acting on them

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Inkling or Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning?

Inkling scores 64.2 (B) on agent readiness against Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning's 60.7 (C), and leads in 3 of 5 scored categories. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning leads on reach and agent interface.

Other comparisons with Inkling or Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

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