# Inkling vs o4-mini

> Inkling is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 41.6 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/inkling-vs-o4-mini
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 32

## Summary

- They share 32 benchmarks with published results for both. Inkling scores higher in 4 categories and o4-mini in 5 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Inkling leads 40.6 to 24.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is ARC-AGI-2: 36.5% for Inkling and 6.1% for o4-mini.
- o4-mini is cheaper at $1.10 / $4.40 per million input/output tokens, against $1.87 / $4.68 for Inkling.
- o4-mini accepts more context: 200K tokens versus 66K.
- Inkling has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Thinking Machines Lab | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 44.1 | 41.6 |
| Rank | 75 | 119 |
| Context | 66K | 200K |
| Input $/M | $1.87 | $1.10 |
| Output $/M | $4.68 | $4.40 |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Inkling: 34.1 (#229)
- o4-mini: 41.6 (#110)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 32.3% | 52.6% |
| LMArena Coding | 1463 | 1369 |
| ALE-Bench | 946 | 826.17 |
| FrontierCode | 14% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 45% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 72% |
| LMArena WebDev | 1412 | — |
| FrontierSWE | 4.1% | — |
| SciCode | 47% | — |
| GSO | — | 3.6% |
| CadEval | — | 62% |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.72 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Inkling: 29.5 (#76)
- o4-mini: 32.3 (#57)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 33.8% | — |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 53.2% |
| GDPval | — | 25.3% |
| τ²-bench Banking | 25% | — |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 63.9% |

## Reasoning

- Inkling: 40.6 (#48)
- o4-mini: 24.6 (#143)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 36.5% | 6.1% |
| SimpleBench | 50% | 38.7% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 79.5% | 58.7% |
| CritPt | 5.4% | 0.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | 21% | 26% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1452 | 1351 |
| DTBench | 87.5% | 77.6% |
| LMCA | 37.6% | 26.5% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 148.6 | 145.63 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 67.6% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 9.2% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 5% |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.8 |

## Math

- Inkling: 31.2 (#198)
- o4-mini: 40.2 (#79)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 33.3% | 36.1% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 4.9% | 4.9% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 88.9% | 81.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1482 | 1390 |
| ProofBench | 0% | — |
| Omni-MATH | — | 72% |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 97.8% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 24.8% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 6.3% |

## Knowledge

- Inkling: 55.2 (#44)
- o4-mini: 43.5 (#83)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 88.3% | 79.6% |
| SimpleQA Verified | 40.3% | 19.6% |
| LMArena Expert | 1468 | 1344 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 18.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 82% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.8% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 18.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 73.5% |

## Multimodal

- Inkling: —
- o4-mini: 39.5 (#46)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1194 |
| GeoBench | — | 64% |
| VPCT | — | 57.5% |

## Multilingual

- Inkling: 54.2 (#49)
- o4-mini: 47.2 (#149)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1434 | 1336 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1495 | 1355 |
| LMArena French | 1453 | 1362 |
| LMArena German | 1456 | 1336 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1428 | 1308 |
| LMArena Korean | 1401 | 1313 |
| LMArena Russian | 1430 | 1334 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1442 | 1346 |

## Instruction Following

- Inkling: 75.3 (#65)
- o4-mini: 75.4 (#63)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1427 | 1321 |
| IFEval | — | 92.8% |

## Long Context

- Inkling: 43.9 (#79)
- o4-mini: 45.5 (#31)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1436 | 1315 |
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 77.8% |

## Writing & Preference

- Inkling: 65.5 (#48)
- o4-mini: 54.2 (#148)

| Benchmark | Inkling | o4-mini |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1443 | 1353 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1390 | 1294 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1436 | 1350 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 75% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1611 | — |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1226 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Inkling better than o4-mini?

Inkling is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 41.6 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Inkling or o4-mini?

o4-mini is cheaper. It lists at $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens; Inkling lists at $1.87 and $4.68.

### Is Inkling or o4-mini better for coding?

o4-mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.6 versus 34.1 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

o4-mini does, with 200K tokens against 66K.

### How many benchmarks do Inkling and o4-mini share?

32 benchmarks have published results for both models. Inkling has 41 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.