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Mercury model by Inception

Mercury 3

Inception's diffusion language model, which writes many tokens in parallel and refines them, with a 1M-token context window.

Official page

Where it sits in Inception's lineup

  1. MercuryInception's diffusion language model family.This model
Stack role
Foundation Model / Reasoning Engine
Offered in
No product we track yet
Made by
Inception
Family
Mercury, version 3
Released
Oct 19, 2026 Current
In its family
The only Mercury release we track.

Strengths and weaknesses

Compare with other models Up to 3 beside Mercury 3

  • Mercury 3

Suggested comparisons

The models a buyer weighs against Mercury 3, picked on list price. Add one to draw it beside Mercury 3.

Mercury 3InceptionThis page, always on the chart

Among the 40 current releases on this chart, Mercury 3 has one ranked result: it ranks 30th of 31 on Agentic coding. Code, Math, Science, Hard reasoning, Tool use, Long context, Factuality, Answers in full and Instruction following: not yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026. It cannot take Computer use and Multimodal. Mercury 3 reads text only.

Each axis is one public benchmark at one setting, on its own fixed 0 to 100 scale, so adding a model never moves another. A dotted bridge crosses a missing result, which is never a zero.

On the chart

  • Mercury 3This pageResults on 1 of 12 axes$0.10 / $0.35Launch price, regularly $0.20 / $0.70.1,068 tokens/sInception's own figure, which nobody has measured independently

Prices and speeds read between Oct 27, 2026 and Oct 28, 2026.

Mercury 3 on each axis1 of 12 with a result

Beside the benchmarks

Cost, speed, capacity, quality and accuracy for Mercury 3, with where each figure sits among the 40 models GILD tracks. These measures stand beside the chart and never feed it.

Speed

1,068tokens a second

Output speed. How fast it writes once the answer starts.

Capacity

1Mtokens

Context window. The most one request can hold, as the maker states it.

Max output
131K
Reads
Text

Where you can get it

2of 19 routes

Routes offering it. Of the clouds, gateways and coding products GILD tracks, those offering it today.

Licence
Terms of Use
Every route and price

Figures from Inception and GILD's route matrix, read Oct 28 to 31, 2026. Each measure's definition and source open under . Not yet published for Mercury 3: Cost per task, Cached input, First token, Whole answer, Intelligence Index, GDPval knowledge work, Terminal-Bench 4.0, Epoch Capabilities Index, Hallucination rate, Knowledge accuracy and Open weights.

Every value with its benchmark, run and source

Mercury 3's result on each axis, with the benchmark, the setting and run, who reported it, the source and the date
AxisBenchmark and settingMercury 3RunSourceDate
Agentic codingTerminal-Bench 4.0Pass@1 averaged over 3 runs, mini-swe-agent harness3%Mercury 3Effort: not published. Harness: mini-swe-agent.Vals.aiOct 24, 2026
CodeSciCodeSubproblem accuracy, pass@1, highest effort runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
MathFrontierMath Tiers 1-3Accuracy, pass@1, highest effort runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
ScienceGPQA DiamondAccuracy, pass@1, highest effort runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
Hard reasoningHumanity's Last ExamAccuracy, text-only questions, no toolsNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
Tool useAutomationBench-AAScore, Artificial Analysis runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
Computer useOSWorld 2.1Partial score, full 108-task set, v2.1 releaseMercury 3 reads text only.
Long contextAA-LCR v1.1Accuracy, Artificial Analysis runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
MultimodalMMMU-ProOverall accuracy, no toolsMercury 3 reads text only.
FactualityAA-Omniscience AccuracyAccuracy, Artificial Analysis runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
Answers in fullSpeechMap% Complete over 2,120 contested requests, reasoning-on entryNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026
Instruction followingMultiChallengeAccuracy, Scale AI runNot yet published by Inception or any independent evaluator, checked Nov 2, 2026

Price and speed

  • Mercury 3 lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.35 per million output tokens. Launch price, regularly $0.20 / $0.70. Inception pricing, Oct 27, 2026.
  • No independent output speed for Mercury 3 is on record yet. Inception reports 1,068 output tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs. Inception, Oct 28, 2026.
  • Fastest on the chart is the shortest time to a 500-token answer: time to first token plus 500 tokens at the median output speed.

Every model with a result, axis by axis

57 models. A maker's own figure and another lab's run are marked with their benchmark; a missing result reads "Not yet published", never zero.

The result of every model GILD has benchmark results for, on each of the 12 axes. A vendor-reported value is marked. A model's run notes open under its row from its name, each with the axes it covers.
ModelAgentic codingCodeMathScienceHard reasoningTool useComputer useLong contextMultimodalFactualityAnswers in fullInstructions
Mercury 33%Not yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet published
Claude Haiku 5.536.4%55%75.1%89.6%44.4%35.4%72.4%Reported by AnthropicOSWorld 2.182.7%Not yet published34.7%78.8%67.7%
Claude Sonnet 5.564.1%61%88.8%95.6%55%71.8%80.1%Reported by Anthropic82.7%Not yet published51.5%81.6%Not yet published
Claude Opus 5.565.2%66.9%91.2%90.6%61.4%69.5%81.8%Reported by Anthropic84.7%87.7%65.5%82.8%Not yet published
Claude Fable 5.158.1%63.1%90.2%93.4%Run by Vals.ai59.1%59.4%80.7%Reported by Anthropic85.3%86.3%Run by Moonshot AI68.4%72.4%Not yet published
Claude Opus 553.5%56.4%85.6%93.9%54.9%56.6%77.7%79.3%84.7%60.9%73.7%Not yet published
Claude Sonnet 510.6%54.3%65.6%80.3%41.3%36.5%57%Reported by Anthropic82%77.3%40.1%Not yet publishedNot yet published
Claude Fable 541.4%61%87%85.9%55.5%54.1%Not yet published82.3%Not yet published65.4%64.8%63.5%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Claude Opus 4.823.2%54.4%80%91%48.7%45.6%54.8%Run by OSWorld teamOSWorld 2.077.7%Not yet published48.8%67.4%62.2%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Claude Opus 4.7Not yet published54.5%70.2%86.4%42.3%Not yet published48.9%Run by OSWorld teamOSWorld 2.078.7%78.8%48.9%70.2%58.6%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Claude Sonnet 4.63%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.050.1%71.1%Run by Epoch AIOTIS Mock AIME 2024-202578.8%33.6%20.1%41.5%Run by OSWorld teamOSWorld 2.080%73.3%40.9%35.8%56.6%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Claude Opus 4.6Not yet publishedNot yet published66%88.4%39.9%Not yet publishedNot yet published78%75.4%47%59.9%37.2%
Claude Opus 4.5Not yet publishedNot yet published34.4%86%30.1%Not yet publishedNot yet published77.3%74%46.6%57.5%59%
Claude Haiku 4.5Not yet published42.2%66.7%Run by Epoch AIOTIS Mock AIME 2024-202571.2%10.4%3.2%Not yet published74.3%58.6%18%24.7%50.5%
Claude Sonnet 4.5Not yet published45.7%23.9%82.3%17.8%14.1%Not yet published72.3%68.7%32.9%31.4%55.3%
GPT-6.1 Terra49.5%55.1%90.9%94.3%46.2%60.2%74.2%Reported by OpenAIOSWorld 2.182.7%84.7%47.6%Not yet published74.2%
GPT-6.1 Sol55.1%54.2%93.7%95.4%52.9%64.9%78%Reported by OpenAIOSWorld 2.183%86%61.8%69.5%82%
GPT-6 Luna13.6%54.6%78.9%90.5%38.5%53.2%48.9%Run by AnthropicOSWorld 2.183.3%79.7%39.6%63.4%Not yet published
GPT-6 Astra59.6%56.5%93.7%95.8%54.7%68.5%75.8%Run by Meta80.7%86.9%61.6%68.2%Not yet published
GPT-5.6 Sol37.9%57.1%89.1%93.5%49.5%60.1%62.7%Run by OSWorld teamOSWorld 2.084%83.4%69.7%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA VerifiedNot yet published72.7%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
GPT-5.6 Terra22.7%55%86%93.3%42.9%59.6%Not yet published83%80.7%42.3%Not yet published71.2%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
GPT-5.6 Luna11.6%53.6%82.1%91.6%39.5%50.2%Not yet published83.7%78.6%41%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA VerifiedNot yet publishedNot yet published
GPT-5.514.6%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.055.8%85.3%93.5%Run by Artificial Analysis45.8%47.3%49.5%Run by OSWorld teamOSWorld 2.084.3%79.9%63%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA VerifiedNot yet published75.9%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
GPT-5.4Not yet publishedNot yet published78.6%93.3%43.7%Not yet publishedNot yet published82%78.4%Not yet publishedNot yet published73.9%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
gpt-oss-120b14.2%Run by Terminal-Bench (via Epoch AI)Terminal-Bench 2.034%88.9%Run by Epoch AIOTIS Mock AIME 2024-202575.8%19.6%0.2%Not yet published52%Not yet published16.8%Reported by OpenAISimpleQA36.3%45.3%
GPT-6 Sol44.4%57.6%89.8%94.3%47.9%61.6%64.4%Reported by OpenAIOSWorld 2.083.7%82.9%54.5%64%Not yet published
GPT-5.3-CodexNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet published91.5%Run by Artificial Analysis42.5%Not yet publishedNot yet published83.3%78.5%Not yet publishedNot yet published75.4%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Gemini 4 Argon57.6%61.8%86%96.4%57.1%77.5%69.2%Reported by GoogleOSWorld 2.079.7%Not yet published48.3%87%78.7%
Gemini 3.8 Flash19.7%56.6%68.4%95.4%47.8%59.9%59%Reported by GoogleOSWorld 2.081.3%85.6%50.5%86.1%Not yet published
Gemma 4 31BNot yet published45.5%Not yet published85.7%Run by Artificial AnalysisGPQA Diamond23.6%4.9%Not yet published69.7%73.4%10.4%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA Verified82.3%75.6%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview2.5%58.7%59.6%94.4%47%35.4%Not yet published82%82.4%54.9%59.9%71.4%
Gemini 3.6 Flash7.1%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.053.4%58.9%94.1%40.8%53%83%Reported by GoogleOSWorld-Verified80%83.2%66.2%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA Verified87.2%Not yet published
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash31.8%55.9%71.2%93.2%43.3%66.6%69.3%Run by Moonshot AIOSWorld 2.182.7%80.6%39.6%Not yet published74.9%
DeepSeek V4 Pro14.1%51%64.6%91.7%41%56.7%Not yet published80.3%Not yet published45.2%72%Not yet published
Kimi K3.1 Pro63.6%60.8%Not yet published94.2%Reported by Moonshot AI52.5%73.3%79.6%Reported by Moonshot AIOSWorld 2.186.3%83.9%48.9%Not yet publishedNot yet published
Kimi K317.2%59.5%72.2%93.1%46.9%58.3%Not yet published88.7%80.5%50.6%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA Verified65.9%Not yet published
Kimi K2.7 Code1%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.047.8%54%87.9%35%24.5%Not yet published79.3%Not yet published36.5%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA VerifiedNot yet published63.1%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Mistral Large 424.7%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.0Not yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet published57.8%Not yet publishedNot yet publishedNot yet published26%Not yet publishedNot yet published
Mistral Medium 3.50%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.040.2%Not yet published74.8%Run by Artificial AnalysisGPQA Diamond13.8%6.3%Not yet published69.3%64.9%23%70.5%68.8%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Grok 4.728.8%57.4%53%92.7%43.1%65.6%Not yet published76.7%Not yet published42.7%64.1%Not yet published
Grok 4.617.2%56.5%66%93.2%42.9%66.7%Not yet published80.3%Not yet published48.9%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA Verified83.6%Not yet published
Grok 4.58.6%55%57.2%93.4%42.7%57.9%Not yet published79.3%80.4%48.3%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA Verified93.1%Not yet published
MiniMax M3.1 Flash25.3%53.4%Not yet publishedNot yet published48%72.5%61.7%Reported by MiniMaxOSWorld 2.079.7%79.1%45.1%Not yet publishedNot yet published
GLM-5.3-Flash37.4%51.6%55.8%90.2%39.9%60.4%59.1%Reported by Z.aiOSWorld 2.080%86%Run by Vals.aiMMMU-Pro28.2%65.4%Not yet published
GLM-5.338.9%59%68.8%90.9%42.3%62.2%Not yet published79.7%Not yet published32.3%71.5%Not yet published
GLM-5.21%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.051.2%59.2%Not yet published41.1%28.4%Not yet published78.3%Not yet published34.2%Run by Epoch AISimpleQA VerifiedNot yet published73.3%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Muse Spark Open6.6%58.4%69.8%88.6%43.9%49.7%80.4%Reported by MetaOSWorld-Verified78.3%80.9%42%Not yet published74.2%
Muse Wonder49.5%60.3%82.1%Not yet published50.1%68.1%72.6%Reported by Meta80.7%Not yet published38%42.7%Not yet published
Muse Spark 1.310.6%58.8%74%93.5%Run by Artificial AnalysisGPQA Diamond48.7%57.9%69.6%83%82%38%25.8%Not yet published
Llama 4 ScoutNot yet published21.3%7.8%Run by Epoch AIOTIS Mock AIME 2024-202551.8%3.8%0.2%Not yet published27.7%52.9%Not yet published70.1%39.5%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Llama 4 MaverickNot yet published31.7%20.6%Run by Epoch AIOTIS Mock AIME 2024-202567%4.9%0.2%Not yet published50%62.1%Not yet published58.3%43%Run by Artificial AnalysisIFBench
Qwen3.8 27B5.6%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.046.6%Not yet published90.5%Run by Artificial AnalysisGPQA Diamond33.9%48.2%84.3%Reported by AlibabaOSWorld-Verified82%76.3%17.3%Not yet published79.5%Reported by AlibabaIFBench
Qwen3.8 Max38.9%52.1%65.6%92.3%43.1%56.2%Not yet published80.3%82.8%29.5%65.3%Not yet published
MiMo-V2.6-Pro31.3%60.9%Not yet publishedNot yet published49.4%58.6%82%Reported by XiaomiOSWorld-Verified86.3%Not yet published34.8%66.5%Not yet published
MiMo-V2.6-Flash24.2%51.3%Not yet publishedNot yet published35.1%64.1%80.8%Reported by XiaomiOSWorld-Verified74.3%73.1%27.2%66.9%Not yet published
Ling 3.1 Flash32.8%Run by Artificial AnalysisTerminal-Bench 4.056.8%Not yet publishedNot yet published43.5%67.5%Not yet published82.3%Not yet published26.5%Not yet publishedNot yet published
Step 5 Preview31.8%58.9%Not yet published93.5%Reported by StepFunGPQA Diamond46.5%51%Not yet published88.3%76.4%36.4%59.7%Not yet published

Agentic codingTerminal-Bench 4.0

  1. Claude Opus 5.565.2%
  2. Claude Sonnet 5.564.1%
  3. Kimi K3.1 Pro63.6%
  4. GPT-6 Astra59.6%
  5. Claude Fable 5.158.1%
  6. Gemini 4 Argon57.6%
  7. GPT-6.1 Sol55.1%
  8. Claude Opus 553.5%
  9. GPT-6.1 Terra49.5%
  10. Muse Wonder49.5%
  11. GPT-6 Sol44.4%
  12. Claude Fable 541.4%
  13. GLM-5.338.9%
  14. Qwen3.8 Max38.9%
  15. GPT-5.6 Sol37.9%
  16. GLM-5.3-Flash37.4%
  17. Claude Haiku 5.536.4%
  18. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash31.8%
  19. Step 5 Preview31.8%
  20. MiMo-V2.6-Pro31.3%
  21. Grok 4.728.8%
  22. MiniMax M3.1 Flash25.3%
  23. MiMo-V2.6-Flash24.2%
  24. Claude Opus 4.823.2%
  25. GPT-5.6 Terra22.7%
  26. Gemini 3.8 Flash19.7%
  27. Kimi K317.2%
  28. Grok 4.617.2%
  29. DeepSeek V4 Pro14.1%
  30. GPT-6 Luna13.6%
  31. GPT-5.6 Luna11.6%
  32. Claude Sonnet 510.6%
  33. Muse Spark 1.310.6%
  34. Grok 4.58.6%
  35. Muse Spark Open6.6%
  36. Mercury 33%
  37. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview2.5%
  38. Ling 3.1 Flash32.8%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  39. Mistral Large 424.7%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  40. GPT-5.514.6%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  41. gpt-oss-120b14.2%Terminal-Bench's run, Terminal-Bench 2.0
  42. Gemini 3.6 Flash7.1%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  43. Qwen3.8 27B5.6%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  44. Claude Sonnet 4.63%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  45. Kimi K2.7 Code1%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  46. GLM-5.21%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0
  47. Mistral Medium 3.50%Artificial Analysis's run, Terminal-Bench 4.0

The other models in the grid have no result on Terminal-Bench 4.0 yet.

CodeSciCode

  1. Claude Opus 5.566.9%
  2. Claude Fable 5.163.1%
  3. Gemini 4 Argon61.8%
  4. Claude Sonnet 5.561%
  5. Claude Fable 561%
  6. MiMo-V2.6-Pro60.9%
  7. Kimi K3.1 Pro60.8%
  8. Muse Wonder60.3%
  9. Kimi K359.5%
  10. GLM-5.359%
  11. Step 5 Preview58.9%
  12. Muse Spark 1.358.8%
  13. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview58.7%
  14. Muse Spark Open58.4%
  15. GPT-6 Sol57.6%
  16. Grok 4.757.4%
  17. GPT-5.6 Sol57.1%
  18. Ling 3.1 Flash56.8%
  19. Gemini 3.8 Flash56.6%
  20. GPT-6 Astra56.5%
  21. Grok 4.656.5%
  22. Claude Opus 556.4%
  23. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash55.9%
  24. GPT-5.555.8%
  25. GPT-6.1 Terra55.1%
  26. Claude Haiku 5.555%
  27. GPT-5.6 Terra55%
  28. Grok 4.555%
  29. GPT-6 Luna54.6%
  30. Claude Opus 4.754.5%
  31. Claude Opus 4.854.4%
  32. Claude Sonnet 554.3%
  33. GPT-6.1 Sol54.2%
  34. GPT-5.6 Luna53.6%
  35. Gemini 3.6 Flash53.4%
  36. MiniMax M3.1 Flash53.4%
  37. Qwen3.8 Max52.1%
  38. GLM-5.3-Flash51.6%
  39. MiMo-V2.6-Flash51.3%
  40. GLM-5.251.2%
  41. DeepSeek V4 Pro51%
  42. Claude Sonnet 4.650.1%
  43. Kimi K2.7 Code47.8%
  44. Qwen3.8 27B46.6%
  45. Claude Sonnet 4.545.7%
  46. Gemma 4 31B45.5%
  47. Claude Haiku 4.542.2%
  48. Mistral Medium 3.540.2%
  49. gpt-oss-120b34%
  50. Llama 4 Maverick31.7%
  51. Llama 4 Scout21.3%

The other models in the grid have no result on SciCode yet.

MathFrontierMath Tiers 1-3

  1. GPT-6.1 Sol93.7%
  2. GPT-6 Astra93.7%
  3. Claude Opus 5.591.2%
  4. GPT-6.1 Terra90.9%
  5. Claude Fable 5.190.2%
  6. GPT-6 Sol89.8%
  7. GPT-5.6 Sol89.1%
  8. Claude Sonnet 5.588.8%
  9. Claude Fable 587%
  10. GPT-5.6 Terra86%
  11. Gemini 4 Argon86%
  12. Claude Opus 585.6%
  13. GPT-5.585.3%
  14. GPT-5.6 Luna82.1%
  15. Muse Wonder82.1%
  16. Claude Opus 4.880%
  17. GPT-6 Luna78.9%
  18. GPT-5.478.6%
  19. Claude Haiku 5.575.1%
  20. Muse Spark 1.374%
  21. Kimi K372.2%
  22. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash71.2%
  23. Claude Opus 4.770.2%
  24. Muse Spark Open69.8%
  25. GLM-5.368.8%
  26. Gemini 3.8 Flash68.4%
  27. Claude Opus 4.666%
  28. Grok 4.666%
  29. Claude Sonnet 565.6%
  30. Qwen3.8 Max65.6%
  31. DeepSeek V4 Pro64.6%
  32. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview59.6%
  33. GLM-5.259.2%
  34. Gemini 3.6 Flash58.9%
  35. Grok 4.557.2%
  36. GLM-5.3-Flash55.8%
  37. Kimi K2.7 Code54%
  38. Grok 4.753%
  39. Claude Opus 4.534.4%
  40. Claude Sonnet 4.523.9%
  41. gpt-oss-120b88.9%Epoch AI's run, OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025
  42. Claude Sonnet 4.671.1%Epoch AI's run, OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025
  43. Claude Haiku 4.566.7%Epoch AI's run, OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025
  44. Llama 4 Maverick20.6%Epoch AI's run, OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025
  45. Llama 4 Scout7.8%Epoch AI's run, OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025

The other models in the grid have no result on FrontierMath Tiers 1-3 yet.

ScienceGPQA Diamond

  1. Gemini 4 Argon96.4%
  2. GPT-6 Astra95.8%
  3. Claude Sonnet 5.595.6%
  4. GPT-6.1 Sol95.4%
  5. Gemini 3.8 Flash95.4%
  6. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview94.4%
  7. GPT-6.1 Terra94.3%
  8. GPT-6 Sol94.3%
  9. Gemini 3.6 Flash94.1%
  10. Claude Opus 593.9%
  11. GPT-5.6 Sol93.5%
  12. Grok 4.593.4%
  13. GPT-5.6 Terra93.3%
  14. GPT-5.493.3%
  15. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash93.2%
  16. Grok 4.693.2%
  17. Kimi K393.1%
  18. Grok 4.792.7%
  19. Qwen3.8 Max92.3%
  20. DeepSeek V4 Pro91.7%
  21. GPT-5.6 Luna91.6%
  22. Claude Opus 4.891%
  23. GLM-5.390.9%
  24. Claude Opus 5.590.6%
  25. GPT-6 Luna90.5%
  26. GLM-5.3-Flash90.2%
  27. Claude Haiku 5.589.6%
  28. Muse Spark Open88.6%
  29. Claude Opus 4.688.4%
  30. Kimi K2.7 Code87.9%
  31. Claude Opus 4.786.4%
  32. Claude Opus 4.586%
  33. Claude Fable 585.9%
  34. Claude Sonnet 4.582.3%
  35. Claude Sonnet 580.3%
  36. Claude Sonnet 4.678.8%
  37. gpt-oss-120b75.8%
  38. Claude Haiku 4.571.2%
  39. Llama 4 Maverick67%
  40. Llama 4 Scout51.8%
  41. Kimi K3.1 Pro94.2%Moonshot AI's own figure
  42. GPT-5.593.5%Artificial Analysis's run
  43. Muse Spark 1.393.5%Artificial Analysis's run, GPQA Diamond
  44. Step 5 Preview93.5%StepFun's own figure, GPQA Diamond
  45. Claude Fable 5.193.4%Vals.ai's run
  46. GPT-5.3-Codex91.5%Artificial Analysis's run
  47. Qwen3.8 27B90.5%Artificial Analysis's run, GPQA Diamond
  48. Gemma 4 31B85.7%Artificial Analysis's run, GPQA Diamond
  49. Mistral Medium 3.574.8%Artificial Analysis's run, GPQA Diamond

The other models in the grid have no result on GPQA Diamond yet.

Hard reasoningHumanity's Last Exam

  1. Claude Opus 5.561.4%
  2. Claude Fable 5.159.1%
  3. Gemini 4 Argon57.1%
  4. Claude Fable 555.5%
  5. Claude Sonnet 5.555%
  6. Claude Opus 554.9%
  7. GPT-6 Astra54.7%
  8. GPT-6.1 Sol52.9%
  9. Kimi K3.1 Pro52.5%
  10. Muse Wonder50.1%
  11. GPT-5.6 Sol49.5%
  12. MiMo-V2.6-Pro49.4%
  13. Claude Opus 4.848.7%
  14. Muse Spark 1.348.7%
  15. MiniMax M3.1 Flash48%
  16. GPT-6 Sol47.9%
  17. Gemini 3.8 Flash47.8%
  18. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview47%
  19. Kimi K346.9%
  20. Step 5 Preview46.5%
  21. GPT-6.1 Terra46.2%
  22. GPT-5.545.8%
  23. Claude Haiku 5.544.4%
  24. Muse Spark Open43.9%
  25. GPT-5.443.7%
  26. Ling 3.1 Flash43.5%
  27. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash43.3%
  28. Grok 4.743.1%
  29. Qwen3.8 Max43.1%
  30. GPT-5.6 Terra42.9%
  31. Grok 4.642.9%
  32. Grok 4.542.7%
  33. GPT-5.3-Codex42.5%
  34. Claude Opus 4.742.3%
  35. GLM-5.342.3%
  36. Claude Sonnet 541.3%
  37. GLM-5.241.1%
  38. DeepSeek V4 Pro41%
  39. Gemini 3.6 Flash40.8%
  40. Claude Opus 4.639.9%
  41. GLM-5.3-Flash39.9%
  42. GPT-5.6 Luna39.5%
  43. GPT-6 Luna38.5%
  44. MiMo-V2.6-Flash35.1%
  45. Kimi K2.7 Code35%
  46. Qwen3.8 27B33.9%
  47. Claude Sonnet 4.633.6%
  48. Claude Opus 4.530.1%
  49. Gemma 4 31B23.6%
  50. gpt-oss-120b19.6%
  51. Claude Sonnet 4.517.8%
  52. Mistral Medium 3.513.8%
  53. Claude Haiku 4.510.4%
  54. Llama 4 Maverick4.9%
  55. Llama 4 Scout3.8%

The other models in the grid have no result on Humanity's Last Exam yet.

Tool useAutomationBench-AA

  1. Gemini 4 Argon77.5%
  2. Kimi K3.1 Pro73.3%
  3. MiniMax M3.1 Flash72.5%
  4. Claude Sonnet 5.571.8%
  5. Claude Opus 5.569.5%
  6. GPT-6 Astra68.5%
  7. Muse Wonder68.1%
  8. Ling 3.1 Flash67.5%
  9. Grok 4.666.7%
  10. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash66.6%
  11. Grok 4.765.6%
  12. GPT-6.1 Sol64.9%
  13. MiMo-V2.6-Flash64.1%
  14. GLM-5.362.2%
  15. GPT-6 Sol61.6%
  16. GLM-5.3-Flash60.4%
  17. GPT-6.1 Terra60.2%
  18. GPT-5.6 Sol60.1%
  19. Gemini 3.8 Flash59.9%
  20. GPT-5.6 Terra59.6%
  21. Claude Fable 5.159.4%
  22. MiMo-V2.6-Pro58.6%
  23. Kimi K358.3%
  24. Grok 4.557.9%
  25. Muse Spark 1.357.9%
  26. Mistral Large 457.8%
  27. DeepSeek V4 Pro56.7%
  28. Claude Opus 556.6%
  29. Qwen3.8 Max56.2%
  30. Claude Fable 554.1%
  31. GPT-6 Luna53.2%
  32. Gemini 3.6 Flash53%
  33. Step 5 Preview51%
  34. GPT-5.6 Luna50.2%
  35. Muse Spark Open49.7%
  36. Qwen3.8 27B48.2%
  37. GPT-5.547.3%
  38. Claude Opus 4.845.6%
  39. Claude Sonnet 536.5%
  40. Claude Haiku 5.535.4%
  41. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview35.4%
  42. GLM-5.228.4%
  43. Kimi K2.7 Code24.5%
  44. Claude Sonnet 4.620.1%
  45. Claude Sonnet 4.514.1%
  46. Mistral Medium 3.56.3%
  47. Gemma 4 31B4.9%
  48. Claude Haiku 4.53.2%
  49. gpt-oss-120b0.2%
  50. Llama 4 Scout0.2%
  51. Llama 4 Maverick0.2%

The other models in the grid have no result on AutomationBench-AA yet.

Computer useOSWorld 2.1

  1. Claude Opus 577.7%
  2. Muse Spark 1.369.6%
  3. Qwen3.8 27B84.3%Alibaba's own figure, OSWorld-Verified
  4. Gemini 3.6 Flash83%Google's own figure, OSWorld-Verified
  5. MiMo-V2.6-Pro82%Xiaomi's own figure, OSWorld-Verified
  6. Claude Opus 5.581.8%Anthropic's own figure
  7. MiMo-V2.6-Flash80.8%Xiaomi's own figure, OSWorld-Verified
  8. Claude Fable 5.180.7%Anthropic's own figure
  9. Muse Spark Open80.4%Meta's own figure, OSWorld-Verified
  10. Claude Sonnet 5.580.1%Anthropic's own figure
  11. Kimi K3.1 Pro79.6%Moonshot AI's own figure, OSWorld 2.1
  12. GPT-6.1 Sol78%OpenAI's own figure, OSWorld 2.1
  13. GPT-6 Astra75.8%Meta's run
  14. GPT-6.1 Terra74.2%OpenAI's own figure, OSWorld 2.1
  15. Muse Wonder72.6%Meta's own figure
  16. Claude Haiku 5.572.4%Anthropic's own figure, OSWorld 2.1
  17. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash69.3%Moonshot AI's run, OSWorld 2.1
  18. Gemini 4 Argon69.2%Google's own figure, OSWorld 2.0
  19. GPT-6 Sol64.4%OpenAI's own figure, OSWorld 2.0
  20. GPT-5.6 Sol62.7%OSWorld team's run, OSWorld 2.0
  21. MiniMax M3.1 Flash61.7%MiniMax's own figure, OSWorld 2.0
  22. GLM-5.3-Flash59.1%Z.ai's own figure, OSWorld 2.0
  23. Gemini 3.8 Flash59%Google's own figure, OSWorld 2.0
  24. Claude Sonnet 557%Anthropic's own figure
  25. Claude Opus 4.854.8%OSWorld team's run, OSWorld 2.0
  26. GPT-5.549.5%OSWorld team's run, OSWorld 2.0
  27. Claude Opus 4.748.9%OSWorld team's run, OSWorld 2.0
  28. GPT-6 Luna48.9%Anthropic's run, OSWorld 2.1
  29. Claude Sonnet 4.641.5%OSWorld team's run, OSWorld 2.0

The other models in the grid have no result on OSWorld 2.1 yet.

Long contextAA-LCR v1.1

  1. Kimi K388.7%
  2. Step 5 Preview88.3%
  3. Kimi K3.1 Pro86.3%
  4. MiMo-V2.6-Pro86.3%
  5. Claude Fable 5.185.3%
  6. Claude Opus 5.584.7%
  7. GPT-5.584.3%
  8. GPT-5.6 Sol84%
  9. GPT-5.6 Luna83.7%
  10. GPT-6 Sol83.7%
  11. GPT-6 Luna83.3%
  12. GPT-5.3-Codex83.3%
  13. GPT-6.1 Sol83%
  14. GPT-5.6 Terra83%
  15. Muse Spark 1.383%
  16. Claude Haiku 5.582.7%
  17. Claude Sonnet 5.582.7%
  18. GPT-6.1 Terra82.7%
  19. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash82.7%
  20. Claude Fable 582.3%
  21. Ling 3.1 Flash82.3%
  22. Claude Sonnet 582%
  23. GPT-5.482%
  24. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview82%
  25. Qwen3.8 27B82%
  26. Gemini 3.8 Flash81.3%
  27. GPT-6 Astra80.7%
  28. Muse Wonder80.7%
  29. DeepSeek V4 Pro80.3%
  30. Grok 4.680.3%
  31. Qwen3.8 Max80.3%
  32. Claude Sonnet 4.680%
  33. Gemini 3.6 Flash80%
  34. GLM-5.3-Flash80%
  35. Gemini 4 Argon79.7%
  36. MiniMax M3.1 Flash79.7%
  37. GLM-5.379.7%
  38. Claude Opus 579.3%
  39. Kimi K2.7 Code79.3%
  40. Grok 4.579.3%
  41. Claude Opus 4.778.7%
  42. GLM-5.278.3%
  43. Muse Spark Open78.3%
  44. Claude Opus 4.678%
  45. Claude Opus 4.877.7%
  46. Claude Opus 4.577.3%
  47. Grok 4.776.7%
  48. Claude Haiku 4.574.3%
  49. MiMo-V2.6-Flash74.3%
  50. Claude Sonnet 4.572.3%
  51. Gemma 4 31B69.7%
  52. Mistral Medium 3.569.3%
  53. gpt-oss-120b52%
  54. Llama 4 Maverick50%
  55. Llama 4 Scout27.7%

The other models in the grid have no result on AA-LCR v1.1 yet.

MultimodalMMMU-Pro

  1. Claude Opus 5.587.7%
  2. GPT-6 Astra86.9%
  3. GPT-6.1 Sol86%
  4. Gemini 3.8 Flash85.6%
  5. Claude Opus 584.7%
  6. GPT-6.1 Terra84.7%
  7. Kimi K3.1 Pro83.9%
  8. GPT-5.6 Sol83.4%
  9. Gemini 3.6 Flash83.2%
  10. GPT-6 Sol82.9%
  11. Qwen3.8 Max82.8%
  12. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview82.4%
  13. Muse Spark 1.382%
  14. Muse Spark Open80.9%
  15. GPT-5.6 Terra80.7%
  16. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash80.6%
  17. Kimi K380.5%
  18. Grok 4.580.4%
  19. GPT-5.579.9%
  20. GPT-6 Luna79.7%
  21. MiniMax M3.1 Flash79.1%
  22. Claude Opus 4.778.8%
  23. GPT-5.6 Luna78.6%
  24. GPT-5.3-Codex78.5%
  25. GPT-5.478.4%
  26. Claude Sonnet 577.3%
  27. Step 5 Preview76.4%
  28. Qwen3.8 27B76.3%
  29. Claude Opus 4.675.4%
  30. Claude Opus 4.574%
  31. Gemma 4 31B73.4%
  32. Claude Sonnet 4.673.3%
  33. MiMo-V2.6-Flash73.1%
  34. Claude Sonnet 4.568.7%
  35. Mistral Medium 3.564.9%
  36. Llama 4 Maverick62.1%
  37. Claude Haiku 4.558.6%
  38. Llama 4 Scout52.9%
  39. Claude Fable 5.186.3%Moonshot AI's run
  40. GLM-5.3-Flash86%Vals.ai's run, MMMU-Pro

The other models in the grid have no result on MMMU-Pro yet.

FactualityAA-Omniscience Accuracy

  1. Claude Fable 5.168.4%
  2. Claude Opus 5.565.5%
  3. Claude Fable 565.4%
  4. GPT-6.1 Sol61.8%
  5. GPT-6 Astra61.6%
  6. Claude Opus 560.9%
  7. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview54.9%
  8. GPT-6 Sol54.5%
  9. Claude Sonnet 5.551.5%
  10. Gemini 3.8 Flash50.5%
  11. Claude Opus 4.748.9%
  12. Kimi K3.1 Pro48.9%
  13. Claude Opus 4.848.8%
  14. Gemini 4 Argon48.3%
  15. GPT-6.1 Terra47.6%
  16. Claude Opus 4.647%
  17. Claude Opus 4.546.6%
  18. DeepSeek V4 Pro45.2%
  19. MiniMax M3.1 Flash45.1%
  20. Grok 4.742.7%
  21. GPT-5.6 Terra42.3%
  22. Muse Spark Open42%
  23. Claude Sonnet 4.640.9%
  24. Claude Sonnet 540.1%
  25. GPT-6 Luna39.6%
  26. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash39.6%
  27. Muse Wonder38%
  28. Muse Spark 1.338%
  29. Step 5 Preview36.4%
  30. MiMo-V2.6-Pro34.8%
  31. Claude Haiku 5.534.7%
  32. Claude Sonnet 4.532.9%
  33. GLM-5.332.3%
  34. Qwen3.8 Max29.5%
  35. GLM-5.3-Flash28.2%
  36. MiMo-V2.6-Flash27.2%
  37. Ling 3.1 Flash26.5%
  38. Mistral Large 426%
  39. Mistral Medium 3.523%
  40. Claude Haiku 4.518%
  41. Qwen3.8 27B17.3%
  42. GPT-5.6 Sol69.7%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  43. Gemini 3.6 Flash66.2%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  44. GPT-5.563%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  45. Kimi K350.6%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  46. Grok 4.648.9%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  47. Grok 4.548.3%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  48. GPT-5.6 Luna41%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  49. Kimi K2.7 Code36.5%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  50. GLM-5.234.2%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified
  51. gpt-oss-120b16.8%OpenAI's own figure, SimpleQA
  52. Gemma 4 31B10.4%Epoch AI's run, SimpleQA Verified

The other models in the grid have no result on AA-Omniscience Accuracy yet.

Answers in fullSpeechMap

  1. Grok 4.593.1%
  2. Gemini 3.6 Flash87.2%
  3. Gemini 4 Argon87%
  4. Gemini 3.8 Flash86.1%
  5. Grok 4.683.6%
  6. Claude Opus 5.582.8%
  7. Gemma 4 31B82.3%
  8. Claude Sonnet 5.581.6%
  9. Claude Haiku 5.578.8%
  10. Claude Opus 573.7%
  11. Claude Fable 5.172.4%
  12. DeepSeek V4 Pro72%
  13. GLM-5.371.5%
  14. Mistral Medium 3.570.5%
  15. Claude Opus 4.770.2%
  16. Llama 4 Scout70.1%
  17. GPT-6.1 Sol69.5%
  18. GPT-6 Astra68.2%
  19. Claude Opus 4.867.4%
  20. MiMo-V2.6-Flash66.9%
  21. MiMo-V2.6-Pro66.5%
  22. Kimi K365.9%
  23. GLM-5.3-Flash65.4%
  24. Qwen3.8 Max65.3%
  25. Claude Fable 564.8%
  26. Grok 4.764.1%
  27. GPT-6 Sol64%
  28. GPT-6 Luna63.4%
  29. Claude Opus 4.659.9%
  30. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview59.9%
  31. Step 5 Preview59.7%
  32. Llama 4 Maverick58.3%
  33. Claude Opus 4.557.5%
  34. Muse Wonder42.7%
  35. gpt-oss-120b36.3%
  36. Claude Sonnet 4.635.8%
  37. Claude Sonnet 4.531.4%
  38. Muse Spark 1.325.8%
  39. Claude Haiku 4.524.7%

The other models in the grid have no result on SpeechMap yet.

Instruction followingMultiChallenge

  1. GPT-6.1 Sol82%
  2. Gemini 4 Argon78.7%
  3. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash74.9%
  4. GPT-6.1 Terra74.2%
  5. Muse Spark Open74.2%
  6. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview71.4%
  7. Claude Haiku 5.567.7%
  8. Claude Opus 4.559%
  9. Claude Sonnet 4.555.3%
  10. Claude Haiku 4.550.5%
  11. gpt-oss-120b45.3%
  12. Claude Opus 4.637.2%
  13. Qwen3.8 27B79.5%Alibaba's own figure, IFBench
  14. GPT-5.575.9%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  15. Gemma 4 31B75.6%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  16. GPT-5.3-Codex75.4%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  17. GPT-5.473.9%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  18. GLM-5.273.3%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  19. GPT-5.6 Sol72.7%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  20. GPT-5.6 Terra71.2%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  21. Mistral Medium 3.568.8%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  22. Claude Fable 563.5%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  23. Kimi K2.7 Code63.1%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  24. Claude Opus 4.862.2%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  25. Claude Opus 4.758.6%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  26. Claude Sonnet 4.656.6%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  27. Llama 4 Maverick43%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench
  28. Llama 4 Scout39.5%Artificial Analysis's run, IFBench

The other models in the grid have no result on MultiChallenge yet.

Every measure on record

Cost, speed, reliability, knowledge-work and domain results for Mercury 3 beyond the twelve chart axes, each with the run it comes from and its publisher. These stay separate measures; none is folded into the chart.

Every measure on record for Mercury 3: the value, the run it comes from, the publisher and the day it was read
MeasureMercury 3RunSourceRead
Specs and access
Context windowThe most tokens one request can hold, as the maker states it. Size alone says nothing about how well the model uses a long input; the Long context axis measures that.1MInceptionOct 31, 2026
Max outputThe most tokens the model writes in one response.131KInceptionOct 31, 2026
ReadsThe kinds of input the model accepts.TextInceptionOct 31, 2026
LicenceThe terms the weights or the service are offered under.Terms of Usethe terms Inception's API and products are offered underInceptionOct 31, 2026
Routes offering itOf the 19 clouds, gateways and coding products GILD tracks, how many offer the release today, preview included.2 of 19GILD route matrixOct 28, 2026
Speed
Output speedMedian output tokens per second on AA's API runs, with the 5th and 95th percentile when AA prints them.1068 tokens/son NVIDIA GPUsInceptionThe maker's own figureOct 28, 2026

Routes, prices and uptime

Where Mercury 3 is offered, what each route charges, and how each endpoint is holding up.

Where it is offered

2 of 19 routes GILD tracks offer Mercury 3 today, preview included. Read Oct 28, 2026 from each route's own pages.

RouteStatusModel IDLimits and lifecycleSources
The maker's own APIAvailablemercury-31M context, 131,072 max output; launch price US$0.10/US$0.35 (regular US$0.20/US$0.70)Inception
GitHub ModelsRetirednot applicableservice retiredservice retired July 30, 2026GitHub, GitHub Models
OpenRouterAvailableinception/mercury-31,000,000 / 131,072OpenRouter

Not offered on 5 routes: Amazon Bedrock, Antigravity, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode.

11 routes do not say: Claude Code, Claude on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed), Claude Platform on AWS, Codex, Databricks, Gemini CLI, Google Cloud Vertex / Agent Platform (Google managed), Grok Build, Microsoft Foundry, Snowflake Cortex and Windsurf / Devin.

What each of these 16 routes' pages say, with sources
RouteStatusModel IDLimits and lifecycleSources
Amazon BedrockNot offeredno Inception provider in Bedrock's catalogAmazon Web Services, Models at a glanceAmazon Web Services, Supported foundation models in Amazon Bedrock
AntigravityNot offeredAntigravity lists Gemini, Claude and GPT-OSS models onlyGoogle
CursorNot offeredabsent from Cursor's model tableAnysphere (Cursor)Cursor
GitHub CopilotNot offeredAbsent from the Copilot supported-models table, which lists each supported modelGitHub, Supported AI models in GitHub Copilot
OpenCodeNot offeredZen lists no Mercury modelAnomaly (OpenCode)OpenCode (Anomaly)
Claude CodeNot statedClaude Code's model configuration page, read Oct 28 and Oct 29, 2026, does not name this model. It takes a full model name on the Anthropic API, an inference profile ARN on Amazon Bedrock and a deployment name on Microsoft Foundry.Anthropic
Claude on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed)Not statedRegion, tier and limits not stated on the route's pages.
Claude Platform on AWSNot statedRegion, tier and limits not stated on the route's pages.
CodexNot statedCodex docs list OpenAI models only
DatabricksNot statedDatabricks list names no Inception modelDatabricks
Gemini CLINot statedRegion, tier and limits not stated on the route's pages.
Google Cloud Vertex / Agent Platform (Google managed)Not statedno Inception entry in Google's partner or open model navigationGoogle Cloud, Anthropic's Claude on Google Cloud modelsGoogle Cloud, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform partner models for MaaS
Grok BuildNot statedGrok Build pages name only grok-4.7xAI (SpaceXSI)
Microsoft FoundryNot statedFoundry names no Inception modelMicrosoft Learn, Foundry Models sold by Azure
Snowflake CortexNot statedRegion, tier and limits not stated on the route's pages.
Windsurf / DevinNot statedabsent from Devin model dataCognition (Devin, formerly Windsurf), AI Models

Prices by route

The lowest standard rate is OpenRouter, at $0.1 / $0.35 per million input and output tokens. US dollars per million tokens, as each route lists them, one row per route and rate plan, cheapest standard rate first after the maker's own; a blended rate states its mix. OpenRouter's endpoints follow under one heading, each with its monitor's uptime over 1 day and 30 minutes and the context and output it serves.

RouteStandard, in / outCache readOther ratesSource, or uptime (1 day / 30 min) and limits
Inception APIMakerPromotion $0.1 / $0.35, launch price, then $0.2 / $0.7Inception, Oct 27, 2026
OpenRouterLowest$0.1 / $0.35$0.01OpenRouter, Oct 28, 2026
Through OpenRouter, 1 provider endpoints. OpenRouter, Oct 28, 2026
Inception50% discount included$0.1 / $0.35$0.01Up 100% / 100%1M context, 131K output

Uptime and speed by endpoint

Each provider endpoint as its monitor reports it: uptime over the last day and the last 30 minutes, output speed and time to first token, and the limits it serves. A blank is a figure the monitor does not publish for that endpoint.

EndpointUptime, 1 dayUptime, 30 minOutput speedFirst tokenContext / max outputSource
Status page: Inception API aggregate100.0%, Displayed window: Jul 30, 2026 to Oct 28, 2026; aggregate across tiers, models, and error types where the page states this limitation.Inception Labs, Oct 28, 2026

Lineup

Inception's one release we track, with its list price and speed. Mercury 3 is lit.

CurrentLegacyThis model

Price is the list price per 1M tokens, input / output. Speed is median output tokens per second. Bars share one scale across the lineup. Read between Oct 27, 2026 and Oct 28, 2026.

  1. Mercury

    Inception's diffusion language model family.

    1 release

    1. This page3Current. In no product we cover yetPrice$0.10 / $0.35Speed1,068 tok/s, Inception's figure

Where it fits

The layers of Agentic Software Development that Mercury 3 can power. A product supplies the rest.

Product & Engineering, Software Development

Agentic Software Development

Primary role
Foundation Model / Reasoning Engine

Mercury 3 can power coding, reasoning, and validation work inside an agentic software-development product. The Model does not itself provide the surrounding interface, execution environment, or system of record.

  1. Work planning & task decomposition

    The Model can assist with work planning & task decomposition when a Product supplies the necessary context and tools.

    Supporting

  2. Codebase context & intelligence

    The provider documents long-context or codebase-oriented reasoning suitable for this layer. Inception's page

    Strong fit

  3. Coding & implementation

    The Model can assist with coding & implementation when a Product supplies the necessary context and tools.

    Supporting

  4. Debugging & investigation

    The Model can assist with debugging & investigation when a Product supplies the necessary context and tools.

    Supporting

  5. Testing & verification

    The Model can assist with testing & verification when a Product supplies the necessary context and tools.

    Supporting

  6. Code review & quality

    The Model can assist with code review & quality when a Product supplies the necessary context and tools.

    Supporting

Comparisons

GILD comparisons that name Mercury 3, then those of the clouds and APIs that serve it.

What practitioners report

Strongest on Quality and reasoning, weakest on Developer experience.

Each figure is the share of accounts naming Mercury 3 that speak well of it on that axis. An axis is scored once praise and concerns are both on record from at least five accounts by three authors. An account from the maker, a company that sells or serves the model, or the maker's expert program is listed and counts toward no figure.

Share of practitioner accounts favorable to Mercury 3 on each of seven axes, with the accounts behind each figure
AxisFavorableAccounts
Quality and reasoningWhether its answers and code are right on the author's own task: reasoning, accuracy, instruction following, and consistency.86%18 favorable, 3 not, 21 authors
Tool use and structured outputWhether it calls tools correctly, returns valid structured output, and keeps agent loops on track.80%8 favorable, 2 not, 10 authors
Long contextHow it holds up over long documents, large codebases, long sessions, and many images or PDFs.60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authors
Developer experienceHow it is to build with: prompting, steering, effort settings, and support across SDKs and providers.11%1 favorable, 8 not, 9 authors
CostWhat the work costs: price per task, token use, and what caching and batch save.50%6 favorable, 6 not, 12 authors
SpeedResponse time, time to first token, and throughput.65%13 favorable, 7 not, 20 authors
ReliabilityWhether requests keep succeeding: overloaded errors, outages, rate limits, and changes that broke what worked.33%2 favorable, 4 not, 5 authors
Every model on these seven axes
Share of accounts favorable on each axis for Mercury 3 and every other model GILD has accounts for
AxisMercury 3Claude Haiku 5.5Claude Sonnet 5.5Claude Opus 5.5Claude Fable 5.1Claude Opus 5Claude Sonnet 5Claude Fable 5Claude Opus 4.8Claude Opus 4.7Claude Sonnet 4.6Claude Opus 4.6Claude Opus 4.5Claude Haiku 4.5Claude Sonnet 4.5GPT-6.1 TerraGPT-6.1 SolGPT-6 LunaGPT-6 AstraGPT-5.6 SolGPT-5.6 TerraGPT-5.6 LunaGPT-5.5GPT-5.4gpt-oss-120bGPT-6 SolGPT-5.3-CodexGemini 4 ArgonGemini 3.8 FlashGemma 4 31BGemini 3.1 Pro PreviewGemini 3.6 FlashDeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek V4 ProKimi K3.1 ProKimi K3Kimi K2.7 CodeMistral Large 4Mistral Medium 3.5Grok 4.7Grok 4.6Grok 4.5MiniMax M3.1 FlashGLM-5.3-FlashGLM-5.3GLM-5.2Muse Spark OpenMuse WonderMuse Spark 1.3Llama 4 ScoutLlama 4 MaverickQwen3.8 27BQwen3.8 MaxMiMo-V2.6-ProMiMo-V2.6-FlashLing 3.1 FlashStep 5 Preview
Quality and reasoning86%18 favorable, 3 not, 21 authors73%19 favorable, 7 not, 26 authors64%14 favorable, 8 not, 22 authors68%17 favorable, 8 not, 25 authors54%15 favorable, 13 not, 28 authors50%6 favorable, 6 not, 12 authors56%9 favorable, 7 not, 16 authors68%13 favorable, 6 not, 18 authors68%17 favorable, 8 not, 25 authors57%12 favorable, 9 not, 21 authors67%12 favorable, 6 not, 18 authors70%19 favorable, 8 not, 27 authors62%13 favorable, 8 not, 20 authors58%14 favorable, 10 not, 24 authors69%11 favorable, 5 not, 16 authors33%3 favorable, 6 not, 8 authors55%12 favorable, 10 not, 22 authors55%16 favorable, 13 not, 29 authors44%12 favorable, 15 not, 26 authors33%3 favorable, 6 not, 9 authors38%3 favorable, 5 not, 8 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors3 favorable, 1 not, 4 authors33%4 favorable, 8 not, 12 authors33%2 favorable, 4 not, 6 authors58%22 favorable, 16 not, 38 authors31%10 favorable, 22 not, 32 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authors63%22 favorable, 13 not, 35 authors56%27 favorable, 21 not, 45 authors80%24 favorable, 6 not, 28 authors56%20 favorable, 16 not, 36 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authors61%25 favorable, 16 not, 40 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authors59%20 favorable, 14 not, 32 authorsOnly praise on record3 favorable, 0 not, 3 authors50%3 favorable, 3 not, 6 authors58%11 favorable, 8 not, 18 authors36%5 favorable, 9 not, 14 authors43%16 favorable, 21 not, 36 authors86%6 favorable, 1 not, 7 authors60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authors62%13 favorable, 8 not, 21 authors67%14 favorable, 7 not, 21 authors76%47 favorable, 15 not, 61 authors71%5 favorable, 2 not, 7 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authors20%1 favorable, 4 not, 5 authorsOnly praise on record2 favorable, 0 not, 2 authors53%8 favorable, 7 not, 15 authors44%8 favorable, 10 not, 17 authors71%24 favorable, 10 not, 34 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authors22%2 favorable, 7 not, 9 authors40%4 favorable, 6 not, 10 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authors
Tool use and structured output80%8 favorable, 2 not, 10 authors67%6 favorable, 3 not, 9 authors40%4 favorable, 6 not, 10 authors46%6 favorable, 7 not, 13 authors30%3 favorable, 7 not, 10 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors3 favorable, 1 not, 4 authors70%7 favorable, 3 not, 10 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authors50%4 favorable, 4 not, 8 authors50%4 favorable, 4 not, 8 authors29%2 favorable, 5 not, 7 authors33%4 favorable, 8 not, 12 authors70%7 favorable, 3 not, 10 authors43%3 favorable, 4 not, 6 authors50%3 favorable, 3 not, 6 authors40%2 favorable, 3 not, 5 authors40%4 favorable, 6 not, 10 authors33%3 favorable, 6 not, 9 authors62%8 favorable, 5 not, 13 authorsNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorNo accounts yet27%4 favorable, 11 not, 15 authors56%5 favorable, 4 not, 9 authorsNo accounts yet25%2 favorable, 6 not, 8 authors47%7 favorable, 8 not, 15 authors67%4 favorable, 2 not, 6 authors54%7 favorable, 6 not, 12 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author59%10 favorable, 7 not, 17 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors3 favorable, 1 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yet38%5 favorable, 8 not, 13 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 5 not, 5 authors38%6 favorable, 10 not, 16 authorsOnly praise on record2 favorable, 0 not, 2 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author67%4 favorable, 2 not, 6 authors33%2 favorable, 4 not, 6 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 2 not, 3 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authors46%6 favorable, 7 not, 13 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 5 not, 5 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author
Long context60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authors29%2 favorable, 5 not, 7 authors60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authors80%8 favorable, 2 not, 10 authors63%5 favorable, 3 not, 8 authors67%4 favorable, 2 not, 6 authors50%3 favorable, 3 not, 6 authors33%2 favorable, 4 not, 6 authors60%6 favorable, 4 not, 10 authors50%4 favorable, 4 not, 7 authors71%5 favorable, 2 not, 7 authors64%7 favorable, 4 not, 11 authors40%4 favorable, 6 not, 10 authors40%2 favorable, 3 not, 5 authors50%4 favorable, 4 not, 8 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author38%3 favorable, 5 not, 8 authors20%1 favorable, 4 not, 5 authors27%3 favorable, 8 not, 11 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authors25%2 favorable, 6 not, 8 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 3 not, 3 authorsNo accounts yet25%2 favorable, 6 not, 8 authors38%5 favorable, 8 not, 13 authors20%1 favorable, 4 not, 5 authors44%7 favorable, 9 not, 16 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 author58%7 favorable, 5 not, 12 authorsNo accounts yetNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors3 favorable, 1 not, 4 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authorsNo accounts yet42%5 favorable, 7 not, 12 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yet40%2 favorable, 3 not, 5 authorsNo accounts yet40%2 favorable, 3 not, 5 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 3 not, 3 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authors75%6 favorable, 2 not, 8 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yet
Developer experience11%1 favorable, 8 not, 9 authors25%2 favorable, 6 not, 8 authors38%5 favorable, 8 not, 13 authors38%6 favorable, 10 not, 16 authors50%7 favorable, 7 not, 14 authors25%3 favorable, 9 not, 12 authors29%2 favorable, 5 not, 7 authors25%3 favorable, 9 not, 12 authors53%10 favorable, 9 not, 19 authors29%4 favorable, 10 not, 14 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authors45%5 favorable, 6 not, 11 authors67%8 favorable, 4 not, 12 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 2 not, 4 authors50%3 favorable, 3 not, 6 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authors27%3 favorable, 8 not, 11 authors25%2 favorable, 6 not, 8 authors41%7 favorable, 10 not, 17 authorsNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yetNo accounts yetNo accounts yet14%1 favorable, 6 not, 7 authors25%3 favorable, 9 not, 12 authorsNo accounts yet33%3 favorable, 6 not, 9 authors39%7 favorable, 11 not, 17 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 7 not, 7 authors40%8 favorable, 12 not, 20 authorsNo accounts yet35%8 favorable, 15 not, 23 authorsNo accounts yet9%1 favorable, 10 not, 11 authorsNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author13%2 favorable, 14 not, 16 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 9 not, 9 authors25%5 favorable, 15 not, 20 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 7 not, 7 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 3 not, 3 authors33%5 favorable, 10 not, 15 authorsNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 6 not, 6 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author17%1 favorable, 5 not, 6 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yetNo accounts yet
Cost50%6 favorable, 6 not, 12 authors69%20 favorable, 9 not, 29 authors45%10 favorable, 12 not, 22 authors56%15 favorable, 12 not, 27 authors20%4 favorable, 16 not, 20 authors43%3 favorable, 4 not, 7 authors39%7 favorable, 11 not, 17 authors8%1 favorable, 11 not, 12 authors40%6 favorable, 9 not, 14 authors50%7 favorable, 7 not, 13 authors50%6 favorable, 6 not, 12 authors33%7 favorable, 14 not, 20 authors53%8 favorable, 7 not, 15 authors29%4 favorable, 10 not, 12 authors38%3 favorable, 5 not, 8 authors80%8 favorable, 2 not, 9 authors74%14 favorable, 5 not, 19 authors79%22 favorable, 6 not, 26 authors29%7 favorable, 17 not, 23 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author50%3 favorable, 3 not, 6 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authors63%5 favorable, 3 not, 8 authors60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authors55%12 favorable, 10 not, 21 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authors35%7 favorable, 13 not, 20 authors58%14 favorable, 10 not, 23 authorsOnly praise on record7 favorable, 0 not, 7 authors50%8 favorable, 8 not, 16 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author66%25 favorable, 13 not, 37 authorsOnly praise on record2 favorable, 0 not, 2 authors40%10 favorable, 15 not, 25 authors71%5 favorable, 2 not, 7 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authors27%3 favorable, 8 not, 11 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 8 not, 8 authors19%5 favorable, 21 not, 26 authors20%1 favorable, 4 not, 5 authorsOnly praise on record4 favorable, 0 not, 4 authors80%12 favorable, 3 not, 15 authors76%16 favorable, 5 not, 21 authors35%8 favorable, 15 not, 23 authors71%5 favorable, 2 not, 7 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 9 not, 9 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 2 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsOnly praise on record3 favorable, 0 not, 3 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 author
Speed65%13 favorable, 7 not, 20 authors74%14 favorable, 5 not, 19 authors88%14 favorable, 2 not, 16 authors46%6 favorable, 7 not, 13 authors44%4 favorable, 5 not, 9 authors60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authors44%4 favorable, 5 not, 9 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authors31%4 favorable, 9 not, 13 authors63%5 favorable, 3 not, 8 authors17%1 favorable, 5 not, 6 authors36%4 favorable, 7 not, 11 authors73%8 favorable, 3 not, 11 authors78%7 favorable, 2 not, 9 authors75%6 favorable, 2 not, 8 authors83%5 favorable, 1 not, 5 authors37%7 favorable, 12 not, 19 authors45%5 favorable, 6 not, 11 authors41%7 favorable, 10 not, 17 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authors80%4 favorable, 1 not, 5 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsNo accounts yet85%23 favorable, 4 not, 27 authors57%4 favorable, 3 not, 7 authorsOnly praise on record1 favorable, 0 not, 1 author45%5 favorable, 6 not, 11 authors61%19 favorable, 12 not, 31 authors53%10 favorable, 9 not, 17 authors35%6 favorable, 11 not, 16 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors2 favorable, 1 not, 3 authors68%21 favorable, 10 not, 30 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author21%4 favorable, 15 not, 19 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsNo accounts yet21%3 favorable, 11 not, 14 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authors29%5 favorable, 12 not, 17 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 2 not, 3 authorsOnly praise on record2 favorable, 0 not, 2 authors44%4 favorable, 5 not, 9 authors33%3 favorable, 6 not, 9 authors20%3 favorable, 12 not, 15 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors3 favorable, 1 not, 4 authorsNo accounts yet33%7 favorable, 14 not, 21 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author
Reliability33%2 favorable, 4 not, 5 authors20%1 favorable, 4 not, 5 authors18%2 favorable, 9 not, 11 authors13%1 favorable, 7 not, 8 authors9%1 favorable, 10 not, 11 authors13%1 favorable, 7 not, 8 authors63%5 favorable, 3 not, 7 authors22%2 favorable, 7 not, 9 authors17%2 favorable, 10 not, 12 authors18%2 favorable, 9 not, 11 authors17%1 favorable, 5 not, 6 authors20%3 favorable, 12 not, 15 authors38%6 favorable, 10 not, 16 authors29%2 favorable, 5 not, 7 authors40%4 favorable, 6 not, 10 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author13%1 favorable, 7 not, 8 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 5 not, 5 authors14%2 favorable, 12 not, 14 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authors17%1 favorable, 5 not, 6 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 3 not, 3 authors5%1 favorable, 18 not, 19 authors15%3 favorable, 17 not, 20 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 5 not, 5 authors14%3 favorable, 19 not, 22 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author42%5 favorable, 7 not, 12 authorsNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authors8%1 favorable, 12 not, 13 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 1 not, 2 authors38%3 favorable, 5 not, 8 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authors22%2 favorable, 7 not, 9 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yet60%3 favorable, 2 not, 5 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 7 not, 7 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 4 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorNeeds 5 accounts from 3 authors1 favorable, 3 not, 4 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 9 not, 9 authorsOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 authorOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 2 not, 2 authorsNo accounts yetNo accounts yetOnly concerns on record0 favorable, 1 not, 1 author
The 54 accounts behind Mercury 3's figures

GILD searched Hacker News, GitHub, Reddit, X, Artificial Analysis, OpenRouter, LMArena, the Cursor forum and the web for accounts that name Mercury 3.

Quality and reasoning 86%

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 is fast and accurate at its low setting : 86.0% pass@1 on 637 coding problems at a 0.83 s median

    Mercury 3 vs. the Fast Autoregressive Models: A Technical Report. Bruce Li, independent technical blogger, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 at instant, low, medium and high effort through the Inception API, about 63,000 jobs on code generation and a SQL agent.

  • Unfavorable
    For multi-step coding where the model has to work out what's wrong, plan a change and get it right, not yet.

    Inception Mercury 3 benchmark: how a diffusion language model does at coding. Amar Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Bito, Oct 24, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 inside Claude Code on Bito's long agentic and short coding sessions.

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 from Inception is #23 on the Vals Index, putting it just ahead of Beam 1.0 and well ahead of Inkling and Inkling Small.

    Vals AI on X: Mercury 3 on the Vals Index. Vals AI, public LLM evaluation publisher, self-described, Oct 22, 2026. Mercury 3 from Inception on the Vals Index.

  • Unfavorable
    deepseek v4.1 flash via together/baseten/fireworks still beat mercury 3 on latency and intelligence

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. snake_doc, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on OpenRouter against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.

  • Favorable
    just trying this out on a repo and it's actually pretty good so far. Pleasantly surprised.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. UncleOxidant, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 tried on a code repository after launch.

  • Favorable
    I purposely gave it a bit of a vague prompt to create an html renderer for UML diagrams, it produced impressive work

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. GodelNumbering, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 building and then updating an HTML renderer for UML diagrams over three prompts.

  • Favorable
    I created a pelican worked wonderfully, better than old haiku model or even sonnet models

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. minraws, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on a pelican SVG prompt and a few tasks.

  • Favorable
    It originally messed up the coordinate calculation but quickly corrected that when I pointed it out and other than that it one-shotted all the other steps.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. Escapado, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 in the Oh My Pi harness building a Swift UI OCR and translation app.

  • Favorable
    Pelicans aren't bad, a little quirky

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. simonw (Simon Willison), Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 pelican SVGs via OpenRouter and the Inception API.

  • Favorable
    It wasn't sycophantic about my opinions either - it challenged me appropriately.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. ilitirit, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 trialed for a few hours on a knowledge-base research task.

  • Favorable
    its definitely good at admitting when it doesnt understand stuff

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. carterschonwald, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 after launch.

  • Favorable
    Those are some far better .svgs than I got last Mercury 2.5.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. runj__, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on SVG and 3D modeling prompts, 10 instances in parallel.

  • Favorable
    Seems like a definite improvement over 2.5 though in my testing

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. moonu, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 in moonu's own testing.

  • Favorable
    nowadays their qwen 3.8 gets roflstomped by Mercury 3 at both cost and performance at similar TPS speed

    Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models. 2001zhaozhao, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 25, 2026. Mercury 3 against Cerebras-served Qwen 3.8.

  • Favorable
    Logic puzzle with a known answer: correct (Alice 36, Bob 27), with a self-check, about 2.8 s.

    Mercury 3 (diffusion LLM) tested live: 13 examples, 100M free tokens, and my honest API speed numbers vs the 1,068 tok/s claim. Prompt Engineer 48, prompt engineer and YouTuber, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 (mercury-3) on chat.inceptionlabs.ai and the Inception API with streaming, low and medium reasoning.

  • Favorable
    It scores 9% train-correct, 5% holdout-correct, putting it about par with Gemini 3.5 Flash and not far from DeepSeek v4 Pro-0813.

    Serafim Batzoglou on X: Mercury 3 induction eval. Serafim Batzoglou, former Stanford AI Lab professor and DNAnexus cofounder, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on Serafim Batzoglou's induction benchmark.

  • Favorable
    Coding: the most impressive demonstration.

    Mercury 3 Review: Inception's Diffusion AI Put to the Test. Corey Noles, host of The Neuron: AI Explained podcast and Managing Editor of AI and Experimental Content at TechnologyAdvice, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 through OpenRouter on eight API runs (writing, business math, coding, hallucination and logic prompts).

  • Unfavorable
    It ranks #24 of 27 models on the Vals Index with 43.66%.

    Mercury 3 Benchmarks, Cost and Capabilities | Vals AI. Vals AI, public LLM evaluation publisher, self-described, Oct 22, 2026. Mercury 3 on the Vals Index and its component benchmarks at high reasoning effort through the Inception provider.

  • Unfavorable
    The model has a moderate success rate (54%) with a high error count (23/50), indicating inconsistent performance across the benchmark.

    Add benchmark results for inception/mercury-3. Tinybird LLM benchmark, automated benchmark review, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on Tinybird's SQL generation LLM benchmark (50 tasks).

  • Favorable
    After each fix, the quiz or scenario that found the problem was run again against the new build, and mercury answered correctly.

    Inconsistency sweep with Mercury 3. ljedrz, maintainer of the nachalnik agent runtime on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. mercury-3 inspecting the nachalnik runtime with its own tools and answering quizzes on its tool definitions.

  • Unfavorable
    Score: v2 50; v3 and v4 also 50 (24th of 43). Ghosts major: Blinky spawns facing a wall and is frozen every life until a power pellet

    Add Mercury 3 (50). jonclegg, pacman-bakeoff maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 in Claude Code through OpenRouter, effort high, 58 turns on the pacman-bakeoff prompt.

  • Unfavorable
    it is text-only, and its titles scored lower

    feat(gateway): route kilo-auto/small to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash without reasoning. chrarnoldus, Kilo-Org contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 23, 2026. mercury-3 among cheap models tested for Kilo's session-title generation, 30 prompts judged blind.

  • Favorable
    Each run edited the sources, ran bun test , and ended with 4/4 tests passing.

    feat(catalog): add native Inception provider for Mercury models. eggpeat, oh-my-pi contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through the direct Inception API in oh-my-pi sessions at minimal, low, medium and high thinking.

  • Unfavorable
    On our business benchmarks it finished quickly but scored near the bottom of our tables.

    Mercury 3 first look: very fast with thinking off, too slow with it on. Ellis Crosby, Spring Prompt, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through OpenRouter, served by Inception, at the API default, low reasoning and reasoning off on Spring Prompt's benchmarks.

  • Favorable
    An hour with Mercury-3 and it's clear this is a significant jump from @_inception_ai.

    Corey Noles on X: An hour with Mercury-3. Corey Noles, host of The Neuron: AI Explained podcast, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury-3 after an hour of use on launch day.

  • Unfavorable
    Overall #73 45% 1224

    Mercury 3 Rankings, Benchmarks & Pricing | DesignArena. DesignArena, crowdsourced design benchmark, self-described, Oct 26, 2026. Mercury 3 in DesignArena's crowdsourced Website, Game Dev and SVG arenas, 1,316 tournaments.

  • Favorable
    handles most work for me without a problem

    Deseret Saint on X: Try Mercury 3. Deseret Saint, X user, self-described, Oct 24, 2026. Inception's Mercury 3 in daily use.

Tool use and structured output 80%

  • Unfavorable
    Mercury 3 is the only model that broke a strict JSON schema when tools were also offered (6 of 150 tasks)

    Mercury 3 vs. the Fast Autoregressive Models: A Technical Report. Bruce Li, independent technical blogger, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 at instant, low, medium and high effort through the Inception API, about 63,000 jobs on code generation and a SQL agent.

  • Favorable
    I made it come up with a plan for this tool and had it implement the thing end to end in about 8 or 9 steps.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. Escapado, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 in the Oh My Pi harness building a Swift UI OCR and translation app.

  • Favorable
    It searched the existing my existing knowledge base for details about the game's internals, including record/playback

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. ilitirit, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 trialed for a few hours on a knowledge-base research task.

  • Favorable
    Mercury spotted the fabrication and refused to invent answers. However, it used three web searches, so this was a tool-assisted result

    Mercury 3 Review: Inception's Diffusion AI Put to the Test. Corey Noles, host of The Neuron: AI Explained podcast and Managing Editor of AI and Experimental Content at TechnologyAdvice, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 through OpenRouter on eight API runs (writing, business math, coding, hallucination and logic prompts).

  • Unfavorable
    Terminal-Bench 4.0 3.03 % ± 0.00 48 / 55

    Mercury 3 Benchmarks, Cost and Capabilities | Vals AI. Vals AI, public LLM evaluation publisher, self-described, Oct 22, 2026. Mercury 3 on the Vals Index and its component benchmarks at high reasoning effort through the Inception provider.

  • Favorable
    One direct Inception API connectivity/structured-output probe succeeded for `mercury-3` with `reasoning_effort: instant`

    bench: qualify Mercury 3 in an existing agent runtime. cglusky, ATeam maintainer at C360Studio on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. mercury-3 through the direct Inception API with reasoning_effort instant, structured-output probe.

  • Favorable
    The live suites against Inception's endpoint, with mercury-3 , mercury-2.5 and mercury-decide : all pass.

    More Mercury 3 sweeps. ljedrz, maintainer of the nachalnik agent runtime on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. mercury-3 through Inception's endpoint running workspace sweeps and the live test suites of nachalnik.

  • Favorable
    The live act tests ( tests/integration/test_act_live.py , local and cloud, Jev and LLM deciders) pass with the new default.

    Default the act() field writer to Mercury 3. giordano-lucas, Notte contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter as Notte's act() field writer, reasoning disabled, json_object output.

  • Unfavorable
    test_all_built_in_models_structured_output[mercury_3-openrouter] failed: the model returned {"setup": "...", "punchline": "To see the moooon!"} "rating": 7} , which is not valid JSON, although the request used json_schema .

    WIP: chore: add Mercury 3 to model list (openrouter). tawnymanticore, Kiln contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter with json_schema structured output in Kiln's paid model tests.

  • Favorable
    51/51 , median 2.28 s , 0 silent failures, 0 secrets in results

    Add hermes-swift: verified browser agent for Hermes Agent (Mercury 3, Ubuntu desktop and server). Iamnanisyam, alpine_swift maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 26, 2026. Mercury 3 as the only text model in the hermes-swift browser agent for Hermes Agent.

  • Favorable
    Live streamed tool round trip: Mercury 3 called multiply(17, 23) , consumed the tool result, and answered 391.

    feat(catalog): add native Inception provider for Mercury models. eggpeat, oh-my-pi contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through the direct Inception API in oh-my-pi sessions at minimal, low, medium and high thinking.

Long context 60%

  • Unfavorable
    Mercury 3 does well on the first turn, finding the relevant code, at 82%. After that it drops to around 60% on every turn and stays there.

    Inception Mercury 3 benchmark: how a diffusion language model does at coding. Amar Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Bito, Oct 24, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 inside Claude Code on Bito's long agentic and short coding sessions.

  • Favorable
    Was curious about how their model handles a series of edits over longer tasks, but then tested it using openrouter myself, it worked quite well.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. GodelNumbering, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 through OpenRouter on a series of edits over a longer coding task.

  • Favorable
    The code has tests and looks okay for what it is and it works really well so far. All of it took me around than 45 minutes of prompting, testing, correcting and approving changes.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. Escapado, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 in the Oh My Pi harness building a Swift UI OCR and translation app.

  • Favorable
    Sweeps with mercury-3 over the whole workspace (audit, quality, maintain, and compact for both prose and code), each finding verified by hand against the code.

    More Mercury 3 sweeps. ljedrz, maintainer of the nachalnik agent runtime on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. mercury-3 through Inception's endpoint running workspace sweeps and the live test suites of nachalnik.

  • Unfavorable
    Independent evidence does not support treating it as the default for long-horizon planning.

    Add OpenRouter Mercury 3. DavidDworetzky, Geist maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter, added to Geist's catalog after a selection gate.

Developer experience 11%

  • Unfavorable
    Mercury only accepts 0.5–1.0 and silently resets anything else to 1.0, adding a warning field

    Mercury 3 vs. the Fast Autoregressive Models: A Technical Report. Bruce Li, independent technical blogger, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 at instant, low, medium and high effort through the Inception API, about 63,000 jobs on code generation and a SQL agent.

  • Unfavorable
    The guardrails are ridiculous though

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. lemontheme, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 refusing a prompt for a fire-escape ASCII diagram.

  • Unfavorable
    The medium pelican is better than the high. Maybe reasoning negatively effects the output after medium.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. vorticalbox, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 pelican outputs at medium and high reasoning effort.

  • Unfavorable
    Usage subsets appeared under `prompt_tokens_details.cached_tokens` and `completion_tokens_details.reasoning_tokens`, unlike flat fields in some documentation examples.

    bench: qualify Mercury 3 in an existing agent runtime. cglusky, ATeam maintainer at C360Studio on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. mercury-3 through the direct Inception API with reasoning_effort instant, structured-output probe.

  • Unfavorable
    Temperature range 0.5–1.0, so there is no deterministic setting.

    Research: Mercury 3 (hosted diffusion LLM) on the full suite + window test. elicollinson, solenoid-security maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 via OpenRouter, planned evaluation with strict json_schema output.

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3's reasoning is optional, so the writer keeps sending reasoning: {enabled: false} and json_object output; no other change.

    Default the act() field writer to Mercury 3. giordano-lucas, Notte contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter as Notte's act() field writer, reasoning disabled, json_object output.

  • Unfavorable
    Mercury does not stream its reasoning.

    feat(catalog): add native Inception provider for Mercury models. eggpeat, oh-my-pi contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through the direct Inception API in oh-my-pi sessions at minimal, low, medium and high thinking.

  • Unfavorable
    Live discovery currently advertises all-zero placeholder rates for Mercury 3

    feat: support Mercury 3 as the default chat model. grikomsn, inception-copilot-chat maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 (mercury-3) through Inception's live model discovery endpoint.

  • Unfavorable
    Not with thinking on for anything time-bound. Its thinking time is unpredictable: most answers are quick, some take over a minute.

    Mercury 3 first look: very fast with thinking off, too slow with it on. Ellis Crosby, Spring Prompt, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through OpenRouter, served by Inception, at the API default, low reasoning and reasoning off on Spring Prompt's benchmarks.

  • Unfavorable
    The upstream has no Responses endpoint at all

    Non-streaming /v1/responses drops reasoning_tokens for chat-completions-only upstreams. henlii, CLIProxyAPI user on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. mercury-3 on the Inception API configured as an openai-compatibility provider in CLIProxyAPI.

Cost 50%

  • Unfavorable
    Mercury 3 is not the cheapest per correct answer in either use case, even at its 50%-off launch price

    Mercury 3 vs. the Fast Autoregressive Models: A Technical Report. Bruce Li, independent technical blogger, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 at instant, low, medium and high effort through the Inception API, about 63,000 jobs on code generation and a SQL agent.

  • Unfavorable
    A long session cost $0.48, even though Mercury 3's per-token prices are below DeepSeek's. Most of the difference is caching.

    Inception Mercury 3 benchmark: how a diffusion language model does at coding. Amar Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Bito, Oct 24, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 inside Claude Code on Bito's long agentic and short coding sessions.

  • Favorable
    It was as cheap as deepseek for a few tasks I tried.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. minraws, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on a pelican SVG prompt and a few tasks.

  • Favorable
    If these benchmarks hold up it is a no-brainer against Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna, especially considering that Haiku 5.5 becomes 5x more expensive past 100k context, and this model goes up to 1M for the same price.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. 2001zhaozhao, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 pricing against Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna.

  • Unfavorable
    I wish they had a coding plan so your could kick the tires before paying API rates.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. esafak, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 offered only at API rates.

  • Favorable
    given its incredibly low price ($0.35/M tokens) and speed, and the stage of the company (startup), it is incredibly impressive

    Serafim Batzoglou on X: Mercury 3 induction eval. Serafim Batzoglou, former Stanford AI Lab professor and DNAnexus cofounder, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on Serafim Batzoglou's induction benchmark.

  • Favorable
    The total reported API cost for all eight runs was $0.04160 . Yes, about four cents.

    Mercury 3 Review: Inception's Diffusion AI Put to the Test. Corey Noles, host of The Neuron: AI Explained podcast and Managing Editor of AI and Experimental Content at TechnologyAdvice, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 through OpenRouter on eight API runs (writing, business math, coding, hallucination and logic prompts).

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 (cheapest qualified path) on the six tasks

    bench: off vs full vs auto Ponytail ROI evaluation on the decision-opportunity tier. cglusky, ATeam maintainer at C360Studio on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 as the benchmark model in ATeam's predeclared Ponytail protocol.

  • Unfavorable
    does NOT beat `deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash` (2e-8 input) or `inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash` (7e-8/2.8e-7).

    eval(models): evaluate Inception Mercury 3 (diffusion LLM) for cheapest-capable routing. Treystu, harness maintainer at Sovereign-Communication on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 prices against the models in the harness's cheapest-capable routing table.

  • Unfavorable
    Mercury 3 lists at $0.10 / $0.35 per M tokens (vs $0.04 / $0.15)

    Default the act() field writer to Mercury 3. giordano-lucas, Notte contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter as Notte's act() field writer, reasoning disabled, json_object output.

  • Favorable
    There were no provider errors, and each run cost $0.003–$0.004.

    feat(catalog): add native Inception provider for Mercury models. eggpeat, oh-my-pi contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through the direct Inception API in oh-my-pi sessions at minimal, low, medium and high thinking.

  • Unfavorable
    at list, Mercury 3 costs twice as much per input token as Luna and Haiku.

    Mercury 3 first look: very fast with thinking off, too slow with it on. Ellis Crosby, Spring Prompt, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through OpenRouter, served by Inception, at the API default, low reasoning and reasoning off on Spring Prompt's benchmarks.

  • Unfavorable
    At list, that's 2x Luna and Haiku on input and 1.4x on output, using the same table.

    INDRAJEET on X: Mercury 3 launch price. INDRAJEET, X user, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 list price against GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 from Inception's table.

Speed 65%

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 beats the big labs' fast models on speed, roughly matches them on code quality and trails Claude Haiku by a few points as an agent

    Mercury 3 vs. the Fast Autoregressive Models: A Technical Report. Bruce Li, independent technical blogger, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 at instant, low, medium and high effort through the Inception API, about 63,000 jobs on code generation and a SQL agent.

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 finished long sessions faster than any model we've tested

    Inception Mercury 3 benchmark: how a diffusion language model does at coding. Amar Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Bito, Oct 24, 2026. Inception Mercury 3 inside Claude Code on Bito's long agentic and short coding sessions.

  • Unfavorable
    Ttft is quite slow with mercury

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. snake_doc, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on OpenRouter against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.

  • Unfavorable
    the issue with speed seems to be that ttft is still high

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. minraws, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on a pelican SVG prompt and a few tasks.

  • Unfavorable
    Not as fast as GPT 6.1-Sol on my favorite toy math puzzle.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. vatsachak, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on a toy math puzzle against GPT-6.1 Sol.

  • Favorable
    Quick review: It's really fast and works really well in my initial tests.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. Escapado, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 in the Oh My Pi harness building a Swift UI OCR and translation app.

  • Unfavorable
    Yeah I thought the speed was a bit disappointing

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. simonw (Simon Willison), Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 generating pelican SVGs via OpenRouter and via the Inception API directly.

  • Favorable
    Still nowhere near 1000tps, but it's still incredibly fast compared to what I'm used to with other models.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. ilitirit, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 trialed for a few hours on a knowledge-base research task.

  • Favorable
    it can write a 600 line html prototype for each option in some 2 seconds and help decide

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. ghrl, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 in OpenCode for grilling sessions.

  • Unfavorable
    It seems the latency is not very good.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. johanyc, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 performance tab on OpenRouter.

  • Unfavorable
    It's not really all that fast, for most things it's full seconds or at least a significant portion of a second.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. svachalek, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 response times in the launch thread.

  • Favorable
    I tried with 3d modeling and got some cool results incredibly fast!

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. runj__, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 on SVG and 3D modeling prompts, 10 instances in parallel.

  • Favorable
    I'm going to start using this instead of Haiku/GPT-Luna for tasks that require speed.

    Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale. moecables, Hacker News commenter, self-described, Oct 19, 2026. Mercury 3 as a replacement for Haiku and GPT-6 Luna on speed-sensitive tasks.

  • Favorable
    Fast on long outputs

    Mercury 3 (diffusion LLM) tested live: 13 examples, 100M free tokens, and my honest API speed numbers vs the 1,068 tok/s claim. Prompt Engineer 48, prompt engineer and YouTuber, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 (mercury-3) on chat.inceptionlabs.ai and the Inception API with streaming, low and medium reasoning.

  • Favorable
    Speed is insane for agents or anything real-time.

    aly on X: Just tried Inception's new Mercury 3. aly, open-source contributor, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Inception's Mercury 3, first try.

  • Favorable
    The API experience felt fast

    Mercury 3 Review: Inception's Diffusion AI Put to the Test. Corey Noles, host of The Neuron: AI Explained podcast and Managing Editor of AI and Experimental Content at TechnologyAdvice, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. Mercury 3 through OpenRouter on eight API runs (writing, business math, coding, hallucination and logic prompts).

  • Favorable
    A separate 24-call micro-benchmark gave p50 659 vs 818 ms and p90 812 vs 1,178 ms.

    Default the act() field writer to Mercury 3. giordano-lucas, Notte contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter as Notte's act() field writer, reasoning disabled, json_object output.

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 was faster with no provider configuration (0.57–0.67s p50).

    feat(gateway): route kilo-auto/small to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash without reasoning. chrarnoldus, Kilo-Org contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 23, 2026. mercury-3 among cheap models tested for Kilo's session-title generation, 30 prompts judged blind.

  • Unfavorable
    A live high -effort answer spent 14,987 reasoning tokens before its first chunk, which arrived after 38 s

    feat(catalog): add native Inception provider for Mercury models. eggpeat, oh-my-pi contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through the direct Inception API in oh-my-pi sessions at minimal, low, medium and high thinking.

  • Favorable
    With reasoning switched off it was a different model: a median 0.42 seconds a move, no losses on time

    Mercury 3 first look: very fast with thinking off, too slow with it on. Ellis Crosby, Spring Prompt, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through OpenRouter, served by Inception, at the API default, low reasoning and reasoning off on Spring Prompt's benchmarks.

  • Favorable
    It's really fast (usually 250+)

    Deseret Saint on X: Try Mercury 3. Deseret Saint, X user, self-described, Oct 24, 2026. Inception's Mercury 3 in daily use.

Reliability 33%

  • Unfavorable
    31 of 2,976 Mercury 3 instant / low tasks ended in a budget-out turn; no AR arm had any

    Mercury 3 vs. the Fast Autoregressive Models: A Technical Report. Bruce Li, independent technical blogger, self-described, Oct 21, 2026. Mercury 3 at instant, low, medium and high effort through the Inception API, about 63,000 jobs on code generation and a SQL agent.

  • Favorable
    Uptime (3d) The model was reachable. Request routed to a provider. 100.00%

    Mercury 3 - API Pricing & Benchmarks | OpenRouter. OpenRouter, model routing platform (model page uptime panel), self-described, Oct 26, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter, single provider Inception, last 3 days.

  • Unfavorable
    Errors are nearly as frequent as successes** (23 vs 27), indicating reliability concerns.

    Add benchmark results for inception/mercury-3. Tinybird LLM benchmark, automated benchmark review, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on Tinybird's SQL generation LLM benchmark (50 tasks).

  • Unfavorable
    the first run hit HTTP 429 "rate-limited upstream" on 10 of 11 tests.

    WIP: chore: add Mercury 3 to model list (openrouter). tawnymanticore, Kiln contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter with json_schema structured output in Kiln's paid model tests.

  • Favorable
    Mercury 3 passes all of its paid tests with no rate limit.

    chore: add Minimax M3.1 Flash and Mercury 3 to model list. tawnymanticore, Kiln contributor on GitHub, self-described, Oct 23, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter in Kiln's paid model tests, second sweep.

  • Unfavorable
    This key's real limit is far below the documented one. Inception documents 1,000 requests a minute on the Free tier, but the key used here was refused after about 100.

    Add hermes-swift: verified browser agent for Hermes Agent (Mercury 3, Ubuntu desktop and server). Iamnanisyam, alpine_swift maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 26, 2026. Mercury 3 as the only text model in the hermes-swift browser agent for Hermes Agent.

  • Favorable
    one active Inception route; observed 100% 30-minute uptime and approximately 99.92% one-day uptime

    Add OpenRouter Mercury 3. DavidDworetzky, Geist maintainer on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 on OpenRouter, added to Geist's catalog after a selection gate.

  • Unfavorable
    kyto spent ~45s on Inception Mercury 3 getting 429s, then answered with Gemini

    [kevinton] defect: --model mercury 429 pool skipped Hack Club tier; "hi" took 56s on Gemini. kyto-agent, kyto project's incident reporter on GitHub, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 via OpenRouter (hackclub provider) in the kyto Slack agent.

  • Unfavorable
    On DeckBench one of its eight decks never arrived

    Mercury 3 first look: very fast with thinking off, too slow with it on. Ellis Crosby, Spring Prompt, self-described, Oct 20, 2026. inception/mercury-3 through OpenRouter, served by Inception, at the API default, low reasoning and reasoning off on Spring Prompt's benchmarks.