Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Thinking Machines: Inkling Small
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-21.
| Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | qwen | thinkingmachines |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 76.5 | 38.5 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $0.45/M |
| Output Price | $6.00/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 131,072 | 262,144 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | - |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 74.9 | 42.3 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) costs $3.50, so Inkling Small is about 4.7 times cheaper for the same work.
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Qwen3.8 Max (0902) offers structured output and video input; only Inkling Small offers audio input.
On our blended benchmark score Qwen3.8 Max (0902) leads 76.5 to 38.5.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores higher on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Inkling Small on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization).
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) was released in September 2026 and Inkling Small in July 2026.
Pick Qwen3.8 Max (0902) if you need long documents, structured output, video input, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost or audio input.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 142 | 130 |
| Code Review | 146 | 136 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 132 |
| Code Refactoring | 148 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 150 | 144 |
| Unit Test Generation | 133 | 121 |
| Code Documentation | 137 | 135 |
| Regex Writing | 125 | 123 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 129 | 121 |
| Frontend Component Design | 131 | 123 |
| Data Analysis | 135 | 126 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 136 | 123 |
| ETL Scripting | 138 | 129 |
| JSON Extraction | 122 | 119 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 119 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 134 | 125 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 134 | 125 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 149 | 144 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 118 | 125 |
| Blog Post Writing | 130 | 126 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →