Inkling 2 Small vs Tencent Hy4: cost and benchmark comparison

This comparison puts Thinking Machines's Inkling 2 Small next to Tencent's Tencent Hy4. Price separates them more than anything else; on a blended basis Tencent Hy4 costs 2.6 times as much as Inkling 2 Small. Everything below is read from the benchmark, price and speed data in Franklin AI's catalogue; nothing here comes from a hands-on test.

What they cost

The list prices are $0.30 in and $1.00 out for Inkling 2 Small, and $0.834 in and $2.501 out for Tencent Hy4, per million tokens. That makes Inkling 2 Small's output 60% cheaper.

For a sample workload of 1 million input tokens and 200,000 output tokens, Inkling 2 Small would cost $0.50 and Tencent Hy4 $1.33, a difference of $0.83. For summarising 1,000 documents of 8,000 tokens into 400-token summaries, Inkling 2 Small would come in 64% lower: $2.80 for Inkling 2 Small against $7.67 for Tencent Hy4.

Which is newer

The release dates are November 3, 2026 for Tencent Hy4 and November 5, 2026 for Inkling 2 Small, 2 days apart. That is close enough to count them as the same generation.

Inkling 2 Small is the faster writer

Inkling 2 Small generates about 139 tokens per second and Tencent Hy4 about 94 tokens per second. Inkling 2 Small is ahead by 48% on throughput. Time to first token is 2.2 seconds for Inkling 2 Small and 2.4 seconds for Tencent Hy4.

For a 1,000-token response, first token plus generation comes to roughly 9.4 seconds on Inkling 2 Small and 13 seconds on Tencent Hy4.

Benchmark scores

Tencent Hy4 comes out ahead on the intelligence index, 34.6 to 30.6. That is a clear margin for an index that averages many evaluations.

For context, that places Inkling 2 Small 52nd and Tencent Hy4 42nd out of 109 scored models still on offer.

For coding or maths work specifically, the catalogue has no dedicated index on either side yet.

Cost per point of intelligence

Per point of intelligence index, Inkling 2 Small costs $0.016 of blended price per million tokens and Tencent Hy4 $0.036. Tencent Hy4 costs 2.3 times as much per point, which is the price of its lead.