Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Sol
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-02.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Sol | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | openai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 40.6 | 80.2 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $10.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,050,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 42.3 | 77.5 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and GPT-5.6 Sol costs $4.50, so Inkling Small is about 6.0 times cheaper for the same work.
GPT-5.6 Sol reads up to 1,050,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,575 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only GPT-5.6 Sol offers structured output.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Sol leads 80.2 to 40.6.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 3 (Code Completion, Bulk Data Labeling, Short-Form Summarization), GPT-5.6 Sol on 17 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost or audio input; pick GPT-5.6 Sol if you need long documents, structured output, benchmark performance or the stronger all-round task scores.
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 | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Sol |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 142 |
| Code Review | 136 | 146 |
| Code Completion | 132 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 148 |
| Bug Fixing | 144 | 150 |
| Unit Test Generation | 121 | 133 |
| Code Documentation | 135 | 136 |
| Regex Writing | 123 | 125 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 121 | 129 |
| Frontend Component Design | 123 | 131 |
| Data Analysis | 126 | 135 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 123 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 129 | 138 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 121 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 118 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 125 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 125 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 144 | 149 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 125 | 117 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 130 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →