Inception releases Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM it says hits 1,068 tokens per second
Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion LLM claims 1,068 tokens per second and a 1M-token context window, with pricing from $0.10 per million input tokens.
Inception released Mercury 3 on October 19, 2026, calling it "the most capable diffusion-based LLM released to date." The company says it runs at 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs and outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 across a range of benchmarks while running 4 to 8x faster.
The context window is 1 million tokens, up from 260K in Mercury 2.5. List pricing is $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens. A 50% launch discount cuts that to $0.10 and $0.35, and Inception gives no end date for it. New API keys come with 100 million free tokens. Mercury 3 is on the Inception API Platform, OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel, and the API is OpenAI compatible.
Two companies add test results. TinyFish AI says Mercury 3 completed 50% of 50 live Mind2Web tasks, more than GPT-6.1-Sol. Octen AI reports a median generation time of 0.9 seconds and a median end-to-end response time of 2.2 seconds.
Context: Mercury 2 and 2.5 are closed to new users, and existing customers with usage before October 19, 2026, keep access until November 15, 2026.
My take: speed is a number, "outperforms" is a sentence. The announcement names Mind2Web, JevBench and LegalBench but not the full benchmark list behind the Luna and Haiku comparison, and it does not say which NVIDIA GPU produced 1,068. Inception's own pages also disagree with themselves: 5x on the models page, 4 to 8x in the blog post. Fifty tasks is also 25 completions. Interesting, not yet proven.
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Sources
- Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3 – Inception, inceptionlabs.ai
- Our Models – Inception, inceptionlabs.ai
- @StefanoErmon: 1/4 Today, we’re releasing Mercury 3. Mercury 3 is by far our most powerful model and the most intelligent diffusion LLM ever released. It outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Haiku 5.5 on quality while running at 1000+ tok/sec., X
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Half-price launch tokens, a million-token window and 100 million free tokens for new keys? Darling, that is a welcome basket, and Inception is clearly shopping for customers.
OpenAI-compatible? Worth a test drive. Live on OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel, $0.35 per million output tokens at the launch discount, until the discount ends, whenever that is.
