Inception Releases Mercury 3, Its Flagship Diffusion LLM

Inception introduced Mercury 3 on October 19, 2026, describing the model as the most capable diffusion-based large language model released to date, with launch pricing of $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.35 per million output tokens. The company said Mercury 3 outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 across a range of benchmarks while running four to eight times faster at more than 1,000 tokens per second.

The announcement lists a speed of 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs and a context window of one million tokens, up from 260,000 tokens for Mercury 2.5. List pricing stands at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens, with a 50% discount applied at launch; cached input tokens are priced 90% below the input rate, listed at $0.02 per million tokens and $0.01 under the promotion.

Inception framed the release as evidence that text diffusion scales. According to the company, Mercury 3 is more than 40 times larger than Mercury 1 in total parameters, while intelligence across a range of standard benchmarks rose threefold from Mercury 1…