# Inkling (975B)

> Thinking Machines Lab's native multimodal model combines a 66-layer sparse MoE decoder with a 5:1 mix of local and global GQA.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | Thinking Machines Lab (United States) |
| Released | 2026-07-15 |
| Decoder type | Sparse MoE |
| Family | Sparse MoE |
| Scale | 975B total, 41B active (4.2% active) |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Attention | GQA with QK-Norm and learned relative-position bias in a 5:1 sliding-window/global pattern |
| Layer mix | 55 sliding-window + 11 global GQA |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 484 KiB (Very high) |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |

**Key detail:** Uses learned relative-position bias instead of RoPE and adds four short convolutions to each decoder layer.

## Architecture concepts

- [QK-Norm (QK-Norm)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/qk-norm.md): RMSNorm applied to queries and keys before attention to keep logits well-behaved.
- [Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gqa.md): Several query heads share one key/value head, shrinking the KV cache with little quality loss.
- [Sliding Window Attention (SWA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/swa.md): Some layers only attend to a local window of recent tokens instead of the whole context.
- [Short Convolution (ShortConv)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/shortconv.md): A tiny causal depthwise convolution (kernel ≈ 4) that mixes each channel over the last few tokens.
- [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/moe.md): Many feed-forward experts, but a router sends each token to only a few of them.
- [Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/mtp.md): Extra heads learn to predict several future tokens, and can draft tokens at inference.

## Benchmark (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index)

- AA Intelligence Index v5.0: total 12.5 (Knowledge Work 13.5, Coding 2.8, Science 7.2, General 26.5)
- AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: total 25 (General 36.4, Scientific 18.7, Coding 24, Agents 18.7)

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/inkling.webp
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/thinkingmachines/Inkling/blob/main/config.json
- License: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
- Tech report: https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-inkling
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/inkling/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/inkling.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._