GPT-6.1 Sol vs Inkling Small vs Qwen3.8 27B

GPT-6.1 Sol is the better all-round choice, scoring 72/100 against Inkling Small (68) and Qwen3.8 27B (66). It leads on capability and inputs & features. Inkling Small wins on price. The score weighs capability 50%, price 25%, inputs & features 15%, context window 10%.

Inkling Small is cheaper at $0.58 input / $1.44 output per million tokens (official Thinking Machines API price). Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.40 input / $2.55 output per million tokens (median across 49 API providers); GPT-6.1 Sol costs $2.00 input / $10.00 output per million tokens (official OpenAI API price). At a typical mix of three input tokens to one output token, that is $0.795 per million tokens for Inkling Small versus $0.938 for Qwen3.8 27B (1.2× as much) and $4.00 for GPT-6.1 Sol (5× as much).

GPT-6.1 Sol scores higher on the Capabilities Index (ECI): GPT-6.1 Sol 167.8 (#4 of 165), Qwen3.8 27B 151.8 (#54 of 165) and Inkling Small 150.5 (#58 of 165). Their confidence ranges do not overlap (164.3–172.5 vs 149.9–153.6), so the gap is a real one.

There are no published SWE-bench Verified results for GPT-6.1 Sol, Inkling Small and Qwen3.8 27B yet, so there is no like-for-like coding score. On overall capability, GPT-6.1 Sol leads, which tends to carry over to coding, but test on your own codebase. All three support tool calling for agent workflows.

GPT-6.1 Sol and Inkling Small have the largest context windows (1,050,000 and 1,048,576 tokens), against 262,144 for Qwen3.8 27B. Maximum output per response: GPT-6.1 Sol up to 128,000, Inkling Small up to 1,048,576, Qwen3.8 27B up to 32,768 tokens.

GPT-6.1 Sol accepts text, images and PDFs; Inkling Small accepts text, images and audio; Qwen3.8 27B accepts text, images and video. They handle the same number of input types.

Inkling Small and Qwen3.8 27B publishes its weights (Apache-2.0) and can be self-hosted; GPT-6.1 Sol is proprietary.

GPT-6.1 Sol is the newest, released Sep 29, 2026. Qwen3.8 27B came out Aug 14, 2026; Inkling Small came out Jul 30, 2026. Knowledge cutoff: GPT-6.1 Sol Apr 30, 2026.

Each model gets a 0–100 score on capability (50%, independent benchmark results); price (25%, blended price per million tokens (3 input : 1 output), log scale); inputs & features (15%, image, PDF, audio and video input, tool calling, structured output and reasoning); context window (10%, maximum tokens per request, log scale). Dimensions missing for any model are dropped and the remaining weights rescaled, so every model is judged on the same evidence. Specs and prices come from public model listings and the labs’ own API pages; capability scores come from independent benchmark runs. Data updated Nov 2, 2026.