Grok 4.6 Xhigh vs Inkling 2 Small: price, speed and benchmarks

Grok 4.6 (Xhigh) and Inkling 2 Small are close rivals from SpaceXAI and Thinking Machines. The sharpest difference is price: Inkling 2 Small costs $1.00 per million output tokens, against $6.00 for Grok 4.6 Xhigh. No hands-on testing went into this write-up; it summarises the recorded benchmark, price and speed data for both models.

What they cost

The list prices are $2.00 in and $6.00 out for Grok 4.6 Xhigh, and $0.30 in and $1.00 out for Inkling 2 Small, per million tokens. Grok 4.6 Xhigh costs 6 times as much per output token.

A reference job of 1 million input tokens and 200,000 output tokens costs $3.20 with Grok 4.6 Xhigh and $0.50 with Inkling 2 Small, so Inkling 2 Small saves $2.70. A bigger example, summarising 1,000 documents of 8,000 tokens into 400-token summaries, costs $18.40 on Grok 4.6 Xhigh and $2.80 on Inkling 2 Small: a gap of $15.60.

When they came out

Inkling 2 Small arrived on November 5, 2026, about 3 months after Grok 4.6 Xhigh (August 12, 2026).

Overall capability: effectively tied

The intelligence index has them at 31.0 and 30.6, Grok 4.6 Xhigh first. That is close enough to call a draw on this measure.

For context, that places Grok 4.6 Xhigh 49th and Inkling 2 Small 52nd out of 109 scored models still on offer.

There are no coding or math index scores for either model in the catalogue, which keeps this comparison at the aggregate level.

Is the price in proportion?

Dividing the blended price by the intelligence index gives a rough cost per point: $0.097 for Grok 4.6 Xhigh and $0.016 for Inkling 2 Small, per million tokens. With scores this close, Inkling 2 Small is simply the cheaper way to buy the same capability.

Waiting time

Once a response is under way, Grok 4.6 Xhigh produces roughly 62 tokens per second against 139 tokens per second for Inkling 2 Small. That makes Inkling 2 Small roughly 2.2 times as fast at writing. The wait for the first token averages 47 seconds on Grok 4.6 Xhigh against 2.2 seconds on Inkling 2 Small. In an interactive app, Inkling 2 Small will feel noticeably more responsive. A first-token wait of that length suits background work better than live conversation.

Put together, a 1,500-token answer would take about 71 seconds from Grok 4.6 Xhigh and 13 seconds from Inkling 2 Small, counting the first-token wait.