Inception: Mercury 2
Inception's Mercury 2 delivers solid reasoning and coding capability with strong instruction-following scores and competitive pricing, making it a capable mid-tier option for businesses needing reliable text-based task automation.
Assessment date: April 4, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
Performance Profile
Mercury 2 is an extremely fast reasoning LLM, and the first reasoning diffusion LLM (dLLM).
Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving >1,000 tokens/sec on standard GPUs. Mercury 2 is 5x+ faster than leading speed-optimized LLMs like Claude 4.5 Haiku and GPT 5 Mini, at a fraction of the cost. Mercury 2 supports tunable reasoning levels, 128K context, native tool use, and schema-aligned JSON output. Built for coding workflows where latency compounds, real-time voice/search, and agent loops. OpenAI API compatible. Read more in the blog post.
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text → Text |
| Tokenizer | Other |
Performance Indices
Source: Artificial Analysis
Benchmark Scores
Intelligence
Technical
Content
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
Model Information
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.25 | $0.000250 |
| Output | $0.75 | $0.000750 |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
