Mercury 3 launches at half price
Inception's diffusion model lists at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 output, halved to $0.10 and $0.35 at launch.
Inception has released Mercury 3, a language model that produces text by diffusion rather than one word at a time. The company says it is more than 40 times larger than Mercury 1, handles up to 1 million tokens of context, and generates about 1,068 tokens per second on Nvidia GPUs.
Speed matters most where people or agents wait on every answer, such as voice support, tutoring and browser agents. Inception says Mercury 3 is on par with or better than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on a range of benchmarks while running 4 to 8 times faster. Those are the company's own figures.
The list price is $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens, halved at launch to $0.10 and $0.35. Mercury 3 works with OpenAI-compatible code and is available on Inception's API and through OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel. New API users get 100 million free tokens.