AI startup Inception launches Mercury 3, a diffusion-based LLM claiming ~1,000 tokens per second generation speed

US AI startup Inception launched Mercury 3 on October 19, 2026. The new flagship large language model uses diffusion technology rather than the traditional autoregressive architecture, generating and refining multiple tokens in parallel to drastically improve inference speed. Inception CEO Stefano Ermon told The Deep View that Mercury 3 can generate approximately 1,000 tokens per second, making it 4x to 8x faster than Anthropic's Haiku 5.5, OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna, and Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 Flash.

Regarding pricing, Mercury 3 is currently in its launch promotion period, costing $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.35 per million output tokens. Ermon stated that this price is 50% off the eventual standard rate, and the company is working to make the promotional price permanent in the coming weeks. While the pricing is competitive, Inception emphasizes that Mercury 3's primary advantage is speed rather than low cost, aiming to match or exceed the performance of current mainstream low-to-mid-tier models.

It is important to note that the claims regarding speed multipliers, performance parity, and being the "most capable diffusion-based language model" are based on Inception's own testing and executive statements; there are currently no public third-party independent benchmarks verifying these results. Additionally, Inception has not disclosed the exact total parameter count of Mercury 3, only stating it is 40 times larger than Mercury 1 released in February 2025, which makes it difficult for outsiders to precisely evaluate its energy efficiency under equivalent compute budgets.