Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Inkling

Choose Gemini 3.5 Flash if you want…

• ✓Higher intelligence (Artificial Analysis index 50)
• ✓Larger context window (1.0M)

Choose Inkling if you want…

• ✓Lower price ($1.76 / 1M blended)

Gemini 3.5 Flash

The first Flash-tier model to outperform a Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks, Gemini 3.5 Flash rewrites expectations for what a speed-optimized model can do. At over 280 tokens per second — roughly 4x faster than comparable frontier models — it sustains the throughput that production agent loops demand, while benchmark results on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2%) and MCP Atlas (83.6%) put it ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro on the tasks developers actually care about. Early users call it "an insane value" for delivering near-frontier intelligence at roughly a third of Pro's cost. The 31-point drop in hallucination rate over its predecessor makes it meaningfully more reliable in practice. The honest caveat: time to first token sits around 19 seconds, which stings in latency-sensitive interactions, and aggressive rate limiting has frustrated users hitting it hard. Deep reasoning, hard analytical problems, and ultra-long context retrieval still favor the Pro. But for teams running iterative coding agents, structured data pipelines, or high-throughput chatbots where cost and speed are the binding constraints, Flash 3.5 is the practical choice.

Inkling

Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's first open-weights model, and on just4o.chat it runs through the Vercel AI Gateway under thinkingmachines/inkling. It is a multimodal MoE with 975B total parameters and 41B active, trained to reason over text, images, and audio in a shared space rather than bolting on separate encoders. Controllable thinking effort lets you trade latency for depth, function calling supports agentic workflows, and a 256k context window on the gateway is roomy enough for long multimodal sessions. It is a base-tier model on just4o.chat, billed at 4 base requests per send before length multipliers, at $1.00 per million input and $4.05 per million output tokens (cached input $0.17). Practical caveats: no native web search on this route, and chat attachments currently emphasize image input even though the model itself understands audio. For teams that want an open, customizable multimodal foundation with ZDR-compatible gateway routing, Inkling is a strong addition.