vs
0:5
overall capability wins (0 ties across 5 scored). Mercury 2 leads overall.
- Reasoning0:4
- Pricing3:0
- Specs0:1
Verdict
Mercury 2 edges reasoning & knowledge; Mercury 2 offers ~2.0x larger context (128K vs 66K); Apertus 8B Instruct ships open weights (Apache 2.0).
- Mercury 2 edges reasoning & knowledge
- Mercury 2 offers ~2.0x larger context (128K vs 66K)
- Apertus 8B Instruct ships open weights (Apache 2.0)
- Apertus 8B Instruct is ~3.0x cheaper on a blended token basis than Mercury 2
Cost for 1M in + 250K out
Illustrative chat workload at primary-provider list prices.
- Apertus 8B Instruct
- $0.15
- Mercury 2
- $0.44
Apertus 8B Instruct is about 2.9x cheaper on this workload.
Price per 1M tokens
Full comparison
Organization
Swiss AI Initiative
Inception Labs
Family
Other
Other
License
Apache 2.0
Proprietary
Open weights
Yes
No
Release
Sep 2, 2025
Sep 1, 2026
Knowledge cutoff
-
-
API / provider
Public AI
Inception Labs
Modalities
text → text
text → text
Specs
Context window
66K
128K
Max output
-
-
Parameters
8B
—
Pricing
Input $/1M
$0.10
$0.25
Output $/1M
$0.20
$0.75
Blended $/1M (3∶1)
$0.13
$0.38
Speed
tok/s
-
-
TTFT (s)
-
-
Reasoning
MMLU-Pro
—
—
GPQA Diamond
25.6
77.0
Humanity's Last Exam
5.0
17.1
AIME 2025
—
—
MATH-500
—
—
Humanity's Last Exam (with tools)
—
—
AA-Omniscience Accuracy
9.7
21.2
AA-LCR v1.1
—
43.7
CritPt
—
0.8
MMMU-Pro
—
—
IFBench
22.4
69.8
Chartography
—
—
Chartography (With Tools)
—
—
Coding
SWE-bench Verified
—
—
SWE-bench Pro
—
—
SWE-bench Multilingual
—
—
LiveCodeBench
—
—
Terminal-Bench 2.1
—
27.3
Aider Polyglot
—
—
Terminal-Bench 3
—
—
BigCodeBench
—
—
SciCode
—
37.7
CursorBench
—
—
SWE-Rebench
—
—
NL2Repo-Bench
—
—
DeepSWE
—
—
WebDev Arena
—
1,167
Terminal-Bench 4.0
—
—
CursorBench 4.0
—
—
FrontierCode v1.1 (Main)
—
—
Arena
LMArena Elo
—
—
| Metric | Apertus 8B Instruct | Mercury 2 | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | |||
| Organization | Swiss AI Initiative | Inception Labs | — |
| Family | Other | Other | — |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Proprietary | — |
| Open weights | Yes | No | — |
| Release | Sep 2, 2025 | Sep 1, 2026 | — |
| Knowledge cutoff | - | - | — |
| API / provider | Public AI | Inception Labs | — |
| Modalities | text → text | text → text | — |
| Specs | |||
| Context window | 66K | 128K | B +62K |
| Max output | - | - | — |
| Parameters | 8B | — | — |
| Pricing | |||
| Input $/1M | $0.10 | $0.25 | A +$0.15 |
| Output $/1M | $0.20 | $0.75 | A +$0.55 |
| Blended $/1M (3∶1) | $0.13 | $0.38 | A +$0.25 |
| Speed | |||
| tok/s | - | - | — |
| TTFT (s) | - | - | — |
| Reasoning | |||
| MMLU-Pro | — | — | — |
| GPQA Diamond | 25.6 | 77.0 | B +51.4 pts |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 5.0 | 17.1 | B +12.1 pts |
| AIME 2025 | — | — | — |
| MATH-500 | — | — | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam (with tools) | — | — | — |
| AA-Omniscience Accuracy | 9.7 | 21.2 | B +11.5 pts |
| AA-LCR v1.1 | — | 43.7 | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.8 | — |
| MMMU-Pro | — | — | — |
| IFBench | 22.4 | 69.8 | B +47.4 pts |
| Chartography | — | — | — |
| Chartography (With Tools) | — | — | — |
| Coding | |||
| SWE-bench Verified | — | — | — |
| SWE-bench Pro | — | — | — |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | — | — | — |
| LiveCodeBench | — | — | — |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | — | 27.3 | — |
| Aider Polyglot | — | — | — |
| Terminal-Bench 3 | — | — | — |
| BigCodeBench | — | — | — |
| SciCode | — | 37.7 | — |
| CursorBench | — | — | — |
| SWE-Rebench | — | — | — |
| NL2Repo-Bench | — | — | — |
| DeepSWE | — | — | — |
| WebDev Arena | — | 1,167 | — |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | — | — | — |
| CursorBench 4.0 | — | — | — |
| FrontierCode v1.1 (Main) | — | — | — |
| Arena | |||
| LMArena Elo | — | — | — |
Apertus 8B Instruct
- Context
- 66K
- Parameters
- 8B
- Price
- $0.10 / $0.20
- Speed
- —
- Modalities
- text → text
- License
- Apache 2.0
Fully open, transparent Swiss LLM from EPFL, ETH Zurich, and CSCS — Apache 2.0 weights, training data, and methodology, covering 1,000+ languages.
Mercury 2
- Context
- 128K
- Parameters
- —
- Price
- $0.25 / $0.75
- Speed
- —
- Modalities
- text → text
- License
- Proprietary
Inception Labs' diffusion-based (non-autoregressive) reasoning LLM, API-only with a 128K context window and high-throughput inference on Blackwell GPUs.
Benchmark charts
Winner bars are emphasized. Per-benchmark deltas sit above each chart.