vs
0:2
overall capability wins (0 ties across 2 scored). Mercury 2 leads overall.
- Reasoning0:1
- Pricing0:3
- Specs0:1
Verdict
Mercury 2 edges reasoning & knowledge; Mercury 2 offers ~7.8x larger context (128K vs 16K); Mercury 2 is ~2.0x cheaper on a blended token basis than GPT-3.5 Turbo.
- Mercury 2 edges reasoning & knowledge
- Mercury 2 offers ~7.8x larger context (128K vs 16K)
- Mercury 2 is ~2.0x cheaper on a blended token basis than GPT-3.5 Turbo
Cost for 1M in + 250K out
Illustrative chat workload at primary-provider list prices.
- GPT-3.5 Turbo
- $0.88
- Mercury 2
- $0.44
Mercury 2 is about 2.0x cheaper on this workload.
Price per 1M tokens
Full comparison
Organization
OpenAI
Inception Labs
Family
Other
Other
License
Proprietary
Proprietary
Open weights
No
No
Release
Mar 1, 2023
Sep 1, 2026
Knowledge cutoff
-
-
API / provider
OpenAI
Inception Labs
Modalities
text → text
text → text
Specs
Context window
16K
128K
Max output
4K
-
Parameters
—
—
Pricing
Input $/1M
$0.50
$0.25
Output $/1M
$1.50
$0.75
Blended $/1M (3∶1)
$0.75
$0.38
Speed
tok/s
120
-
TTFT (s)
0.25
-
Reasoning
MMLU-Pro
46.2
—
GPQA Diamond
29.7
77.0
Humanity's Last Exam
—
17.1
AIME 2025
—
—
MATH-500
44.1
—
Humanity's Last Exam (with tools)
—
—
AA-Omniscience Accuracy
—
21.2
AA-LCR v1.1
—
43.7
CritPt
—
0.8
MMMU-Pro
—
—
IFBench
—
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
1,225
—
| Metric | GPT-3.5 Turbo | Mercury 2 | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | |||
| Organization | OpenAI | Inception Labs | — |
| Family | Other | Other | — |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | — |
| Open weights | No | No | — |
| Release | Mar 1, 2023 | Sep 1, 2026 | — |
| Knowledge cutoff | - | - | — |
| API / provider | OpenAI | Inception Labs | — |
| Modalities | text → text | text → text | — |
| Specs | |||
| Context window | 16K | 128K | B +112K |
| Max output | 4K | - | — |
| Parameters | — | — | — |
| Pricing | |||
| Input $/1M | $0.50 | $0.25 | B +$0.25 |
| Output $/1M | $1.50 | $0.75 | B +$0.75 |
| Blended $/1M (3∶1) | $0.75 | $0.38 | B +$0.38 |
| Speed | |||
| tok/s | 120 | - | — |
| TTFT (s) | 0.25 | - | — |
| Reasoning | |||
| MMLU-Pro | 46.2 | — | — |
| GPQA Diamond | 29.7 | 77.0 | B +47.3 pts |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 17.1 | — |
| AIME 2025 | — | — | — |
| MATH-500 | 44.1 | — | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam (with tools) | — | — | — |
| AA-Omniscience Accuracy | — | 21.2 | — |
| AA-LCR v1.1 | — | 43.7 | — |
| CritPt | — | 0.8 | — |
| MMMU-Pro | — | — | — |
| IFBench | — | 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 | 1,225 | — | — |
GPT-3.5 Turbo
- Context
- 16K / 4K out
- Parameters
- —
- Price
- $0.50 / $1.50
- Speed
- 120 tok/s · 0.25s TTFT
- Modalities
- text → text
- License
- Proprietary
Classic ChatGPT-era budget model — still referenced for cheap classification and simple chat.
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.