Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs xAI: Grok Latest
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | xAI: Grok Latest | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | ~x-ai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 10.9 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $6.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 500,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 450,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 12.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Grok Latest costs $3.50, so Inkling Small is about 4.7 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 524,288 and 500,000 tokens, about 786 and 750 pages.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Grok Latest offers structured output.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 5 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Grok Latest on 15 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost or audio input; pick Grok Latest if you need structured output 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 | xAI: Grok Latest |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 134 |
| Code Review | 128 | 134 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 118 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 138 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 138 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 125 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 121 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 123 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 125 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 133 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 129 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 122 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 119 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 139 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 115 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 122 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →