Hi HN, this is Volodymyr, Inception Co-Founder & Chief Scientist.
Today we're launching Mercury 3, our most capable production diffusion LLM.
Quality: Outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 across a range of benchmarks at matched reasoning effort.
Speed: 1,000+ tokens per second on widely available NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, 4–8x faster than those models.
Context: 1M tokens, up from 260K.
Price: $0.10 per million input and $0.35 per million output tokens at launch.
The main takeaway is that diffusion scales. Since Mercury 1 we’ve scaled the model more than 40x in total parameters, and intelligence has gone up at every step without giving up speed.
Diffusion generates tokens in parallel through iterative denoising rather than one at a time, so as reasoning models think longer per answer, the speed advantage over autoregressive models of the same size grows.
Early-access partners are running Mercury 3 in browser agents, tutoring apps, real-time search, and customer support. It’s OpenAI API compatible, and it’s also available on OpenRouter, Baseten, and Vercel.
Try it on our API with 100M free tokens.
Happy to dig into the architecture, scaling results, evals, or anything else in the comments.
Today we're launching Mercury 3, our most capable production diffusion LLM.
Quality: Outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 across a range of benchmarks at matched reasoning effort. Speed: 1,000+ tokens per second on widely available NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, 4–8x faster than those models. Context: 1M tokens, up from 260K. Price: $0.10 per million input and $0.35 per million output tokens at launch.
The main takeaway is that diffusion scales. Since Mercury 1 we’ve scaled the model more than 40x in total parameters, and intelligence has gone up at every step without giving up speed. Diffusion generates tokens in parallel through iterative denoising rather than one at a time, so as reasoning models think longer per answer, the speed advantage over autoregressive models of the same size grows.
Early-access partners are running Mercury 3 in browser agents, tutoring apps, real-time search, and customer support. It’s OpenAI API compatible, and it’s also available on OpenRouter, Baseten, and Vercel.
Try it on our API with 100M free tokens.
Happy to dig into the architecture, scaling results, evals, or anything else in the comments.