Inception Labs Releases Mercury 3: Diffusion LLM Claims Speed Surpassing GPT-6 Luna
Inception Labs launches Mercury 3, claiming it outperforms GPT-6 Luna on agentic benchmarks while running at 1,068 tokens per second.
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US AI startup Inception Labs released its flagship diffusion large language model (LLM), Mercury 3, on October 19, 2026. CEO Stefano Ermon stated that this is the most capable diffusion-based language model currently on the market.
According to Inception Labs' official blog, Mercury 3 outperforms OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 across a range of standard benchmarks, while running at 1,068 tokens per second—4 to 8 times faster than these models. The model has more than 40 times the parameters of its predecessor, Mercury 1, and expands the context window from 260K to 1 million tokens.
Unlike traditional autoregressive models that generate text one token at a time, Mercury 3 uses diffusion technology to generate and refine multiple tokens in parallel, utilizing GPU computing power more efficiently. Inception Labs claims this architecture allows the model to scale significantly while maintaining extremely high inference speeds.
Regarding pricing, Mercury 3's standard rate is $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens. During the launch period, a 50% discount applies, bringing the cost to $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.35 per million output tokens. Ermon told media that the company is working to make this promotional price permanent within weeks.
It should be noted that all performance comparisons and speed metrics mentioned above are based on Inception Labs' internal tests and official statements, and have not yet been independently verified by third parties.