head-to-head

Thinking Machines: Inkling vs Google: Gemma 4 31B

Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.

Thinking Machines: Inkling Google: Gemma 4 31B
Vendorthinkingmachinesgoogle
Quality Score100100
Benchmark Score-53.7
Input Price$1.00/M$0.20/M
Output Price$4.05/M$0.40/M
Context Window524,288262,144
Max Output471,85916,384
Tool Calling✓✓
Structured Output-✓
Reasoning Mode✓✓
Vision✓✓
Audio✓-
Benchmark Scores
ai_index-48.4
ai_index_agentic-23.8
ai_index_coding-71.7
eqbench-57.5

The verdict

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Gemma 4 31B costs $0.30 and Inkling costs $2.01, so Gemma 4 31B is about 6.7 times cheaper for the same work.

Inkling reads up to 524,288 tokens at once, roughly 786 pages of text, against about 393 pages for Gemma 4 31B.

Only Inkling offers audio input; only Gemma 4 31B offers structured output and video input.

Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Gemma 4 31B on 20 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).

Inkling was released in July 2026 and Gemma 4 31B in April 2026.

Pick Inkling if you need long documents or audio input; pick Gemma 4 31B if you need lower cost, structured output, video input 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?

TaskThinking Machines: InklingGoogle: Gemma 4 31B
SQL Generation 125 156
Code Review 128 152
Code Completion 119 131
Code Refactoring 132 151
Bug Fixing 136 160
Unit Test Generation 116 143
Code Documentation 131 137
Regex Writing 119 131
CI/CD Pipelines 116 135
Frontend Component Design 118 138
Data Analysis 120 152
CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup 121 145
ETL Scripting 124 143
JSON Extraction 111 143
Bulk Data Labeling 116 133
OCR / Document Parsing 123 140
Table Extraction from PDFs 123 140
Long-Document Summarization 137 149
Short-Form Summarization 115 129
Blog Post Writing 121 133

Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →

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