GPT-4o vs Inkling

Choose GPT-4o if you want…

• ✓A comparable all-rounder — they trade blows on the headline metrics.

Choose Inkling if you want…

• ✓Higher intelligence (Artificial Analysis index 46)
• ✓Lower price ($1.76 / 1M blended)
• ✓Larger context window (256K)

GPT-4o

Speed is GPT-4o's defining trait. Where comparable models average 61 tokens per second, GPT-4o delivers nearly 200 — and its native audio pipeline hits 320ms response latency, making it the practical choice for voice interfaces and real-time chat. It also collapses text, image, and audio processing into a single unified model rather than routing across separate systems, which produces more coherent multimodal reasoning without the awkward handoffs. Users feel this difference acutely. When OpenAI tried to retire GPT-4o in early 2026, the backlash was fierce enough to reverse the decision — petitions, mass unsubscribe threats, and user surveys suggesting 95% found no adequate replacement. That kind of loyalty comes from how the model feels in practice: snappy, versatile, fluent across 50+ languages, and capable of web search that reasoning-focused models like o1 lack. The honest caveat: GPT-4o trades raw reasoning depth for speed. It scores below average on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index and struggles with complex multi-step logic. For hard reasoning or large-document tasks, newer models outclass it. For fast, general-purpose, multimodal work, few match it.

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.