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On October 21, 2026, Inception released the diffusion language model Mercury 3. According to a report by The Decoder the same day, Inception claims the model won 8 of 12 benchmarks and runs four to eight times faster than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5. In Inception's own testing, Mercury 3 scored 76.84 on IFBench, 15 points higher than GPT-6 Luna; it scored 51.08 on SWE-Bench Atlas, while its competitors scored 33.33 and 32.26 respectively. Claude Haiku 5.5 led on the DeepSWE long-code test and long-text retrieval. The model generates 1,068 tokens per second on Nvidia GPUs, is priced at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens, is available at 50% off during the launch period, and is now live on the Inception platform as well as OpenRouter, Baseten, and Vercel. The report notes that there are currently no independent tests.
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- Source:The Decoder
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Oct 21
The Decoder
Inception Releases Diffusion Language Model Mercury 3, Claiming Speeds Four to Eight Times Faster Than GPT-6 Luna
Inception has released the diffusion language model Mercury 3, claiming it wins 8 of 12 benchmarks and runs four to eight times faster than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5. In Inception's own testing, Mercury 3 scored 76.84 on IFBench, 15 points higher than GPT-6 Luna; it scored 51.08 on SWE-Bench Atlas, versus 33.33 and 32.26 for its competitors. Claude Haiku 5.5 led on the DeepSWE long-code test and long-text retrieval. The model generates 1,068 tokens per second on Nvidia GPUs, is priced at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens, with a 50% discount during the launch period, and is now available on the Inception platform as well as OpenRouter, Baseten, and Vercel; there are currently no independent tests.