Inception Mercury 3 and Particle-1's model are also good.

(I am assuming Inception is an American company, not sure TBH)

> Open weight US based Opus 5.5 within 12 months.

Seems unlikely. Maybe open weight at all near there? That'd be great.

Muse Glimmer is pretty good.

Things have been remarkably "not terrible" since approximately the release of Laguna S 2.1 a while back in early summer 2026, which is now outdated within the past 6 month time frame by other, better non CN open weight models.

I'm not saying that any of them are to the level as a deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 or similar but they're catching up. The most recent huge mistral release is also grounds for an optimistic view.

That’d be the inflection point I’m waiting for!

I give it 2.

It doesn't beat DS v4.1, and they have so much more compute capacity than any Chinese company, yet still cannot even beat MiniMax M3.1 Flash (220B) despite having 2.7x more parameters (596B).

Correctly if I’m wrong but isn’t inkling made by a very well funded startup from an ex - OpenAI exec iirc?

Not beating dsv4.1 at all

If you cant beat Deepseek on price im not using it. I actually dont care about beating DS in capabilities, I dont think you need more intelligence than Deepseek for 99% of the things people work on, and I dont want LLMs to do everything, that kind of defeats the point. I just need a smart fuzzer and to offload some tedious busy work.

So why should I pay for 3-20x more for a few small percentage points in preformance. (I would prefer DS did some things better, but largely I can force my desired behavior), but I could only have access to Deepseek 4.1 and still beat almost everyone using opus/fable/astra on a productivity basis, I need automation tools not "do my entire job so Im worthless tools", and DS has already more than gotten there for me.

Are they distilling from the big labs or Chinese labs at all? In that case isn't it $1 trillion frontier CAPEX + Inkling's costs for the total costs.

"I bought this house with my own savings plus a small million dollar loan from mum and dad."

Oh nice they’ll run well on sparks

edit: nm I see its a bit big

Seems to be pretty close to SOTA on design. I’m excited to try it out with my agentic design system.

Distillation is the tide that lifts all boats

AA lists it as $0.30/0.03/1 and cost per task is $1.18, about double that of deepseek

Just looking through the benchmarks, the model seems to be very high on visual/spatial capabilities. So I assumed they just tried some hard tasks on it and was surprised by wine identification and thought it was surprising that it could identify wines.

What if your coding project is related to wine? So you would want facts about wine to be inside the weights, not through web search.

It's not like they're training on that. That's just a good showcase of how the model is good at generalizing & understanding (not benchmaxxed). You might want something similar to these experts for tasks like detecting anomalies or discoloration or whatever.

You could probably run a Q2-Q3 with 2x DGX Sparks. So...$12k at today's prices. Plenty of folks are running DS 4.1 Flash with Strata and some GPU + bulk in system memory. Maybe more like $3k-$4k? But speeds come down quite a bit.

I would hope that the American models aren't benchmaxxed to hell like all of the Chinese ones are.

Because its american.