vs
0:1
overall capability wins (0 ties across 1 scored). Seed-1.6 Flash leads overall.
- Pricing0:3
- Specs0:1
Verdict
Seed-1.6 Flash offers ~2.0x larger context (256K vs 128K); Seed-1.6 Flash is ~2.9x cheaper on a blended token basis than Mercury 2.
- Seed-1.6 Flash offers ~2.0x larger context (256K vs 128K)
- Seed-1.6 Flash is ~2.9x cheaper on a blended token basis than Mercury 2
Cost for 1M in + 250K out
Illustrative chat workload at primary-provider list prices.
- Mercury 2
- $0.44
- Seed-1.6 Flash
- $0.15
Seed-1.6 Flash is about 2.9x cheaper on this workload.
Price per 1M tokens
Full comparison
Organization
Inception Labs
ByteDance
Family
Other
Other
License
Proprietary
Proprietary
Open weights
No
No
Release
Sep 1, 2026
Jun 11, 2025
Knowledge cutoff
-
-
API / provider
Inception Labs
ByteDance
Modalities
text → text
text, image → text
Specs
Context window
128K
256K
Max output
-
16K
Parameters
—
—
Pricing
Input $/1M
$0.25
$0.07
Output $/1M
$0.75
$0.30
Blended $/1M (3∶1)
$0.38
$0.13
Speed
tok/s
-
130
TTFT (s)
-
0.22
Reasoning
MMLU-Pro
—
—
GPQA Diamond
77.0
—
Humanity's Last Exam
17.1
—
AIME 2025
—
—
MATH-500
—
—
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
—
—
| Metric | Mercury 2 | Seed-1.6 Flash | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | |||
| Organization | Inception Labs | ByteDance | — |
| Family | Other | Other | — |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | — |
| Open weights | No | No | — |
| Release | Sep 1, 2026 | Jun 11, 2025 | — |
| Knowledge cutoff | - | - | — |
| API / provider | Inception Labs | ByteDance | — |
| Modalities | text → text | text, image → text | — |
| Specs | |||
| Context window | 128K | 256K | B +128K |
| Max output | - | 16K | — |
| Parameters | — | — | — |
| Pricing | |||
| Input $/1M | $0.25 | $0.07 | B +$0.17 |
| Output $/1M | $0.75 | $0.30 | B +$0.45 |
| Blended $/1M (3∶1) | $0.38 | $0.13 | B +$0.24 |
| Speed | |||
| tok/s | - | 130 | — |
| TTFT (s) | - | 0.22 | — |
| Reasoning | |||
| MMLU-Pro | — | — | — |
| GPQA Diamond | 77.0 | — | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 17.1 | — | — |
| AIME 2025 | — | — | — |
| MATH-500 | — | — | — |
| 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 | — | — | — |
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.
Seed-1.6 Flash
- Context
- 256K / 16K out
- Parameters
- —
- Price
- $0.07 / $0.30
- Speed
- 130 tok/s · 0.22s TTFT
- Modalities
- text, image → text
- License
- Proprietary
ByteDance Seed Flash tier — cheap long-context multimodal API for Doubao/Volcengine stacks.
Benchmark charts
Winner bars are emphasized. Per-benchmark deltas sit above each chart.
These two models have no overlapping published benchmarks in our dataset. Compare specs and pricing instead.