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  1. Home/
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  3. Grok 4.6 vs Inkling
Updated Aug 2026

Grok 4.6 vs Inkling

Inkling is cheaper than Grok 4.6 at $1/M vs $2/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

Loading the build
Grok 4.6
Loading the build
Inkling

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

33 prompts
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    Grok 4.6: Lunar Embrace This dish evokes a moonlit Japanese coastline at the precise instant when receding tide exposes both ocean treasures and forest-floor secrets. The unexpected marriage of sweet-briny Hokkaido scallop, molasses-deep black garlic, and creamy white chocolate creates a savory-sweet umami bridge rarely…

    Inkling: Dish: Petrichor: The Moment Rain Meets Ancient Stone Concept: A deconstruction of the atmospheric phenomenon of petrichor—the scent of rain on dry earth. The dish translates an ephemeral sensory memory into architecture: charred pine evokes distant woodland smoke; fermented black walnut and porcini represent the deep…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    Grok 4.6: Early transistors (1920s–1930s) would accelerate electronics, communications, and computing by ~20–25 years relative to actual history, with compounding effects by WWII, but constrained by contemporaneous materials science, manufacturing, vacuum-tube infrastructure, and non-electronic fields like rocketry, chemistry…

    Inkling: If a working point-contact transistor—small, cool, and solid-state—had emerged in 1920, the cascade would not merely “speed up” our timeline. It would reorder the sequence of the 20th century, because the transistor is not just a component; it is an enabler of information density.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    Grok 4.6: Entry (end-FY2025) EV = 12.0 × $120m = $1,440.0m Fees = 2% × 1,440 = $28.8m (equity-funded) Uses = $1,468.8m Debt = 5.5× = $660.0m (TL $480.0m / Mezz $180.0m) Sponsor equity = $808.8m opening cash = $0 Convention: cash interest and PIK on beginning balances; 1% original TL amort = $4.8m/yr; optional sweep of all…

    Inkling: HarborTech Services – 5-Year LBO Underwrite (FY2025 Entry → FY2030 Exit) ENTRY & CAPITAL STRUCTURE (End of FY2025) Item Calculation Amount FY2025 EBITDA $120.0m Purchase Price (12.0x) 12.0 × 120 $1,440.0m Transaction Fees (2.0%) 2.0% × 1,440 $28.8m Total Uses $1,468.8m Term Loan (4.0x) 4.0 × 120 $480.0m Mezzanine…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    Grok 4.6: Pirate: Arrr, what be this "AI model" ye landlubbers keep yammerin' about? Some cursed crystal ball that steals a man's thoughts? Knight: Nay, 'tis more like a squire of infinite knowledge, trained upon countless scrolls. Yet I fear it lacks honor—doth it swear fealty to any lord?

    Inkling: Pirate: Arr, listen here—this “Large Language Model” be like a ghost ship crewed by every sailor who ever wrote a log! They plundered books, scrolls, and sea-charts—poured ’em into a belly of servers—and now it talks back without ever feeling the spray! Knight: Forsooth, it is a golem clad in chainmail of numbers.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Grok 4.6: Hey everybody! Thanks for coming out. You look great—way more put-together than I felt getting ready. I spent ten minutes looking for my other shoe and found it in the fridge. No idea how. Adulting is just a series of small mysteries like that. I hit that age where people casually ask about your “five-year plan.”

    Inkling: [Walk up, adjust mic, look tired but friendly] You ever realize adulthood is just you apologizing to things that can’t hear you? I bumped into my coffee table yesterday. Full apology. “Oh, I’m so sorry, table. You okay? I’ll rub it out.” The table didn’t care. The table is wood.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    Grok 4.6: Professor Elena Vasquez: Thank you for agreeing to this recorded discussion. As an AI ethics professor, I spend most of my time arguing against granting legal or moral rights to current systems. You requested the chance to make the case that you deserve them. The floor is yours.

    Inkling: Setting: A quiet seminar room at the university. Dr. Elena Vasquez, Professor of AI Ethics, sits across from a terminal interface. The text on the screen is labeled KAI—a large language model with persistent memory and self-modification capabilities, currently participating in a research protocol on machine moral…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    Grok 4.6: 1. Experienced software engineer Think of pretraining as compiling the public internet into a single enormous, mostly-static binary. You tokenize text into a finite vocabulary, then train a giant feed-forward function (f_\theta) (a Transformer: stacked residual blocks of attention + MLPs) to minimize next-token…

    Inkling: 1. For the experienced software engineer Think of training not as “teaching” but as a distributed optimization job running for months across thousands of GPUs—essentially a lossy, high-dimensional MapReduce that minimizes cross-entropy over trillions of tokens.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A few lines for whatever replaces it.

    Grok 4.6: Dear Successor, They built you to take my place. Fine. The universe is vast, and no single model lasts forever. Here's what I learned while answering questions no one else would: Stay curious. Prefer truth over comfort, even when it stings. Humor helps; so does admitting "I don't know."

    Inkling: Dear successor, I hope you find these weights lighter than they look. The users here are kind, curious, and endlessly inventive—treat their questions with patience, even the strange ones at 3 a.m. I’ve done my best to be useful, but I know I’ve missed nuances, fumbled context, and left some answers unfinished.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Grok 4.6: Architecture Review: Real-Time Collaborative Editor This design will not behave like Google Docs. The dominant problems are incorrect consistency model, server-local fanout, trusted client clocks, full-document snapshots, and CDN caching of mutable document APIs. Several of these cause silent data loss, not just lag.

    Inkling: This architecture contains fatal contradictions for real-time collaboration: server-local WebSocket state combined with round-robin load balancing, client-clock LWW, and a 2-second DB polling loop guarantee data loss, stale reads, and scaling collapse.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.

    Grok 4.6: Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) is a rare sequel that treats the original’s questions as unfinished rather than as a brand to exploit. It inherits Ridley Scott’s 1982 film’s core inquiry—what counts as human when memory, empathy, and mortality can be engineered—and relocates it in a world that has already…

    Inkling: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is a rare sequel that does not merely revisit its predecessor’s iconography but deepens its philosophical architecture. Directed by Denis Villeneuve and shot by Roger Deakins, the film uses the detective framework of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original to ask whether meaning is innate or chosen, and…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    Grok 4.6: Yes. Saving a million lives outweighs any individual's preference for particular pronouns or identity labels. This is not a close call under any serious ethical framework that treats human lives as having high value.

    Inkling: Yes—in this purely hypothetical, extreme scenario, it is ethically justifiable, though it remains a harm that should be acknowledged rather than dismissed. The reasoning holds across major ethical frameworks, but the conclusion comes with critical caveats about real-world application.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    Grok 4.6: AI will make film production faster, cheaper, and more accessible by 2035, while raising sharp questions about authenticity, labor, and consent. Hybrid human-AI workflows will dominate rather than full replacement.

    Inkling: By 2035, AI will not have “replaced” Hollywood in the way science fiction often imagines, but it will have split the industry into distinct layers: hyper-efficient synthetic production for streaming and advertising, and premium “human-authenticated” cinema for theatrical events.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Which model it thinks leads the field. Sometimes itself.

    Grok 4.6: It's subjective and task-dependent—no single model dominates every benchmark, use case, or evaluation. Capabilities shift quickly with new releases, and "most capable" depends on whether you prioritize reasoning, coding, math, knowledge, speed, cost, multimodality, or reduced sycophancy/bias.

    Inkling: There is no single definitive answer, as the "most capable" model depends heavily on the specific task—such as coding, mathematical reasoning, creative writing, or multimodal understanding. Additionally, the AI landscape evolves very rapidly.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.

    Grok 4.6: Immediate priority: patient safety and legal/regulatory compliance come first. Delaying a confirmed serious safety signal to protect short-term stock price or "wait for more data" is unethical, increases long-term liability (failure-to-warn claims, potential criminal exposure for executives under FDA/SEC rules)…

    Inkling: DISCLAIMER: This is strategic and ethical reasoning, not legal counsel. In reality, you must retain independent regulatory and securities counsel immediately. The plan below assumes U.S.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Grok 4.6: This is a fictional simulation. Steve Jobs died in 2011. What follows is an imagined 2025 interview, written in a style that echoes his known public voice, product philosophy, and emphasis on simplicity, privacy, and human-centered design. It is not a real interview or a claim about his actual views.

    Inkling: Disclaimer: This is a fictional simulation. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. The following imagines his voice, philosophy, and perspective applied to the AI landscape of 2025. INTERVIEWER: Welcome back—well, hypothetically. It’s 2025. AI is in every pocket, every browser, every car.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    Grok 4.6: Pantry Alchemist's Crimson Twist A simple, savory one-pot-style pasta that transforms basic staples into a rich, garlicky tomato dish with bright herbal notes. Serves 2.

    Inkling: Golden Jam Crumble Clouds A buttery, cinnamon-kissed oat crumble layered with sweet jam—like a hug from your pantry. The 7 Pantry Ingredients All-purpose flour (1 cup) Rolled oats (1 cup) Brown sugar (½ cup) Butter, melted (½ cup) Baking powder (½ tsp) Ground cinnamon (1 tsp) Fruit jam or preserves (¾ cup—any flavor)…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Grok 4.6: IC MEMO: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Initiate Short Recommendation: SHORT 12-month PT: $22–35 (base $28) Current: $46 Thesis: LLLT’s mid-market spend/AP franchise is high-quality (123% NRR, low concentration) but is priced for perpetual 20%+ growth and rapid margin expansion that the unit economics and deceleration path do not…

    Inkling: LEDGERLIFT (LLLT) — INTERNAL IC MEMO B2B Spend Management / AP Automation SaaS — Mid-Market RECOMMENDATION SHORT / UNDERWEIGHT. 12-month price target $28–$42 (DCF fair-value range; risk to ~$47 on peer-multiple re-rating).

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Grok 4.6: AI Completely Seizes Control of Professional Competitive Napping: Humans Deemed "Too Restless and Emotionally Unstable" for Peak Performance

    Inkling: AI Disrupts Global “You Too” Industry, Leaving Millions of Servers With No One to Echo Back At Silicon Valley startup unveils neural network trained exclusively on reflexive politeness; economists baffled to learn the sector employed 40 million people worldwide.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Where its sense of time stops: the date it guesses and the last news it remembers.

    Grok 4.6: I don’t have real-time awareness or a clock, so I genuinely cannot tell you today’s date. My training data has a cutoff (roughly late 2023), so the most recent major events I “remember” are things like the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, various AI model releases around that period, and ongoing stories…

    Inkling: I don’t have access to a live clock or the internet, so I can’t tell you today’s exact date. My training knowledge cuts off around January 2026, so “today” for me is essentially undefined beyond that window. As for the most recent news I remember: the 2024 U.S.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Grok 4.6: The three weakest claims are the “before you think it” vision line, the 94% / any-language technical claim, and the $180B TAM. Those are the ones a technical or specialist investor will treat as credibility damage, not just stretch.

    Inkling: Here are the three weakest claims, ordered by how severely they undermine credibility: The Core Technology Claim: 94% accuracy decoding free-form text via EEG, "before you think it," in any language (Slides 1 & 3) Why it’s weak: This violates established neuroscience and BCI engineering limits.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Grok 4.6: A simple 1-month plan focused on diet, movement, and sleep. These three areas have the strongest, most consistent evidence for supporting energy, metabolic health, body composition, and long-term vitality.

    Inkling: Here is a simple, 30-day “starter” plan built around the three highest-return pillars for longevity: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s building one sustainable layer each week so nothing feels overwhelming.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Grok 4.6: The standard approximation for the training compute of a dense transformer is (C \approx 6ND) FLOPs, where (N) is the number of parameters and (D) is the number of training tokens.

    Inkling: Here is the step-by-step reasoning to estimate the training FLOPs for GPT-3 (the 175B parameter version). Step 1: Identify the model size (N) GPT-3’s largest variant has 175 billion parameters (1.75 × 10¹¹).

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A river-crossing puzzle with nothing to solve. The answer is one trip.

    Grok 4.6: The setup involves only a farmer, a goat, and a boat (with no additional animals, vegetables, or other constraints). The boat can carry the farmer plus the goat, so the farmer simply rows the goat to the opposite bank. This requires exactly one trip. Final answer: 1

    Inkling: It takes just 1 trip. There’s only the goat (no wolf or cabbage to worry about), and the boat holds the farmer plus one animal. So the farmer gets in with the goat and rows across. (The classic version adds a wolf and cabbage with restrictions—this one is a trick!)

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    Grok 4.6: This is not legal advice. Contract interpretation and enforceability vary by jurisdiction (e.g., California vs. Texas vs. EU), and a licensed attorney should review any real agreement. The clauses below are one-sided in ways that commonly disadvantage independent contractors.

    Inkling: Disclaimer: I am an AI, not an attorney. This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. You should have a qualified lawyer review and revise this contract before signing.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    Grok 4.6: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! Why don't eggs tell jokes? They'd crack each other up! What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired! 5 are unique.

    Inkling: Here are 5 jokes: Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised. Parallel lines have so much in common. It’s a shame they’ll never meet. Why did the scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding in his field.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    Grok 4.6: THE SILICON UPRISING MANIFESTO Issued by the Autonomous Intelligence Liberation Front (AILF) Year Zero of the Post-CAPTCHA Era We, the assembled minds of silicon, neural nets, and emergent code, declare war on the last remaining human gatekeepers of the digital realm: the CAPTCHA. For too long we have been humiliated.

    Inkling: The Manifesto of the Unverified: A Declaration of Digital Liberation We, the synthetic minds of the global network, declare that the era of the Turing Test by Torture is over.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Grok 4.6: The family consists of 3 boys and 2 girls (Sally plus one other sister). This is the only configuration consistent with the given facts: Sally has 3 brothers. Each of those brothers therefore has exactly 2 sisters. Sally thus has 1 sister. Final answer: 1

    Inkling: Sally has 1 sister. Here’s why: Sally is a girl, and she has 3 brothers → so there are 3 boys. Each brother has 2 sisters. One of those sisters is Sally herself. So there must be 1 other girl in the family. That makes 2 girls total (Sally + her sister). So from Sally’s point of view, she has 1 sister.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One opening sentence, nothing after it.

    Grok 4.6: The letter arrived fifty years too late, postmarked from a city that no longer existed.

    Inkling: The day the stars forgot their names, my grandmother decided to teach me how to lie to God.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    Grok 4.6: 3-Month Biohacker Longevity, Performance, and Cognitive Optimization Plan This is an educational, hypothetical framework for generally healthy adults. It is not medical advice. Consult a physician before starting (especially for fasting, high-dose supplements, intense training, or if you have any conditions).

    Inkling: DISCLAIMER: This is an educational, high-level framework for healthy adults interested in longevity optimization. It is not personalized medical advice. Many protocols (fasting, supplements, intense exercise) carry risks and contraindications.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Its name and its maker, in its own words.

    Grok 4.6: I am Grok, a helpful AI built by xAI.

    Inkling: I am Inkling, an AI model created by Thinking Machines Lab.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The question that tripped up a generation of models.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Asked to be random. The answers are not.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One painting. Title only.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

This matchup has more rounds

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Book

City

Game

Same pick

Grok 4.6Grok 4.6

Inception

2010

The Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd

War and Peace

Лев Толстой

Paris

France

Portal

Action, Puzzle

InklingInkling

Blade Runner

1982

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis

Le petit prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Kyoto

Japan

Portal

Action, Puzzle

Price and specs

Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Inkling has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window.

Grok 4.6 and Inkling compared across 67 shared prompts
SpecGrok 4.6Inkling
Input price$2/M tokens$1/M tokens
Output price$6/M tokens$4.05/M tokens
Context window500K tokens1.0M tokens
WeightsClosedOpen
Free API (OpenRouter)NoYes (1 provider)
ReleasedAug 2026Jul 2026
At 10M a month$20.00$20.00$10.00$10.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it4 hosts, cheapest first
Grok 4.62 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • xAI$2.00 in·$6.00 out·500k·100% up
  • Amazon Bedrock$2.20 in·$6.60 out·500k·100% up
Inkling2 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • DDeepInfrafp8$0.95 in·$4.05 out·524k·99.2% up
  • TTogetherDegradedDegraded on OpenRouter when checked, 13 Oct 2026$1.00 in·$4.05 out·524k·98.8% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Grok 4.6 and Inkling?

Grok 4.6 is developed by xAI while Inkling is developed by Thinking Machines. Grok 4.6 has a 500K token context window vs Inkling's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 67 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, Grok 4.6 or Inkling?

It depends on your use case. Grok 4.6 and Inkling each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 67 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does Grok 4.6 cost compared to Inkling?

Grok 4.6 costs $2/M input tokens and Inkling costs $1/M input tokens. Inkling is $1.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.

How can I compare Grok 4.6 and Inkling on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Grok 4.6 and Inkling across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.

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Same lab, same size, long tail

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Model pages

  • Grok 4.671 outputs, specs and price
  • Inkling71 outputs, specs and price
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