Inception releases Mercury 3, a diffusion language model running at over 1,000 tokens per second
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
A fast new type of model has appeared that answers almost instantly and costs little, if the stated figures hold up.
A diffusion model does not write text token by token but refines many tokens in parallel. According to Inception's own tests, Mercury 3 outperforms GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5 and GLM-5.3 Flash while running 4-8 times faster: 1,068 tokens per second on Nvidia GPUs, with a 1-million-token context (previously 260,000). On 50 live Mind2Web web-navigation tasks the model completed 50%. The price is $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens, half that at launch; access is through the Inception API, OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel. The Next Web notes that the data is claimed by the company itself, and there are no independent tests yet.
Sources 2