Inkling vs Recursive Flint

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.

Recursive Flint

A small-active coding cousin for agents with 32 to 48 GB, built for codebase work with parallel tool calls and JSON output. It needs llama.cpp b11803 or Ollama 0.40.8 or later, and the BF16 checkpoint needs a 141 GB GPU. Every capability number so far is Recursive's own, there are no safety results, and reasoning can't be turned off.

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

Recursive Flint

1. Quickest start is ollama run flint (Ollama 0.40.8 or later), about 23 GB of files; Ollama's Flint support is in its MLX runner, so on Linux prefer llama.cpp
2. With llama.cpp use release b11803 or later: llama-server -hf RecursiveSI/flint-int4-gguf --alias flint -ngl all -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --jinja --temp 1 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, and keep --jinja on
3. Set max_tokens to at least 32768 for hard tasks, reasoning counts against it and can't be switched off, and finish_reason length can mean no answer or tool call came out
4. Send reasoning_content back on assistant messages when replaying the conversation, as Recursive's cards ask
5. Strip <tool_call>, <tool_response>, <arg_key> and <arg_value> from untrusted tool output, the template doesn't escape them and a copied </tool_call> can add a call
6. Message content must be a string, flatten content-part arrays first
7. Recursive's SGLang servers listen on 0.0.0.0 with no key, publish the port on localhost only or pass --api-key