SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 vs Thinking Machines: Inkling
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-12.
| SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 | Thinking Machines: Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | x-ai | thinkingmachines |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark Score | - | 15.3 |
| Input Price | $2.00/M | $1.00/M |
| Output Price | $6.00/M | $4.05/M |
| Context Window | 500,000 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 450,000 | 471,859 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | - |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
| Benchmark Scores | ||
| ai_index | - | 20.6 |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling costs $2.01 and Grok 4.6 costs $3.50, so Inkling is about 1.7 times cheaper for the same work.
Both take in a similar amount of text: 500,000 and 524,288 tokens, about 750 and 786 pages.
Only Grok 4.6 offers structured output; only Inkling offers audio input.
Across the 20 tasks where they differ, Grok 4.6 scores higher on 13 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Inkling on 7 (Code Completion, Bug Fixing, Code Documentation and others).
Grok 4.6 was released in August 2026 and Inkling in July 2026.
Pick Grok 4.6 if you need structured output; pick Inkling 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 | SpaceXAI: Grok 4.6 | Thinking Machines: Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 128 |
| Code Review | 132 | 131 |
| Code Completion | 118 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 135 |
| Bug Fixing | 136 | 139 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 118 |
| Code Documentation | 130 | 132 |
| Regex Writing | 118 | 121 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 118 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 120 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 123 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 122 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 126 |
| JSON Extraction | 122 | 111 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 119 | 116 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 124 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 124 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 140 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 114 | 116 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 124 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →