Thinking Machines: Inkling vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-10-19.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | openai |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | 37.2 | 70.0 |
| Input Price | $1.00/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $4.05/M | $12.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,050,000 |
| Max Output | 471,859 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | 41.2 | 69.4 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling costs $2.01 and GPT-5.6 Terra costs $5.00, so Inkling is about 2.5 times cheaper for the same work.
GPT-5.6 Terra reads up to 1,050,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,575 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling.
Only Inkling offers audio input; only GPT-5.6 Terra offers structured output.
On our blended benchmark score GPT-5.6 Terra leads 70.0 to 37.2.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Inkling scores higher on 2 (Code Completion, Short-Form Summarization), GPT-5.6 Terra on 18 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Pick Inkling if you need lower cost or audio input; pick GPT-5.6 Terra 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 | OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 130 | 140 |
| Code Review | 135 | 145 |
| Code Completion | 119 | 118 |
| Code Refactoring | 138 | 147 |
| Bug Fixing | 143 | 149 |
| Unit Test Generation | 120 | 132 |
| Code Documentation | 134 | 135 |
| Regex Writing | 123 | 124 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 128 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 130 |
| Data Analysis | 126 | 134 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 123 | 135 |
| ETL Scripting | 129 | 137 |
| JSON Extraction | 111 | 121 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 116 | 117 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 125 | 134 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 125 | 134 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 144 | 147 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 117 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 126 | 128 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →