vs
1:0
overall capability wins (0 ties across 1 scored). Mercury 2 leads overall.
- Pricing3:0
- Specs1:0
Verdict
Mercury 2 offers ~31.3x larger context (128K vs 4K); Snowflake Arctic Instruct ships open weights (Apache 2.0); Mercury 2 is ~6.4x cheaper on a blended token basis than Snowflake Arctic Instruct.
- Mercury 2 offers ~31.3x larger context (128K vs 4K)
- Snowflake Arctic Instruct ships open weights (Apache 2.0)
- Mercury 2 is ~6.4x cheaper on a blended token basis than Snowflake Arctic Instruct
Cost for 1M in + 250K out
Illustrative chat workload at primary-provider list prices.
- Mercury 2
- $0.44
- Snowflake Arctic Instruct
- $3
Mercury 2 is about 6.9x cheaper on this workload.
Price per 1M tokens
Full comparison
Organization
Inception Labs
Snowflake
Family
Other
Other
License
Proprietary
Apache 2.0
Open weights
No
Yes
Release
Sep 1, 2026
Apr 24, 2024
Knowledge cutoff
-
-
API / provider
Inception Labs
Together / Fireworks (ref.)
Modalities
text → text
text → text
Specs
Context window
128K
4K
Max output
-
4K
Parameters
—
480B (17B act.)
Pricing
Input $/1M
$0.25
$2.40
Output $/1M
$0.75
$2.40
Blended $/1M (3∶1)
$0.38
$2.40
Speed
tok/s
-
45
TTFT (s)
-
0.55
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
—
1,180
| Metric | Mercury 2 | Snowflake Arctic Instruct | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Identity | |||
| Organization | Inception Labs | Snowflake | — |
| Family | Other | Other | — |
| License | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 | — |
| Open weights | No | Yes | — |
| Release | Sep 1, 2026 | Apr 24, 2024 | — |
| Knowledge cutoff | - | - | — |
| API / provider | Inception Labs | Together / Fireworks (ref.) | — |
| Modalities | text → text | text → text | — |
| Specs | |||
| Context window | 128K | 4K | A +124K |
| Max output | - | 4K | — |
| Parameters | — | 480B (17B act.) | — |
| Pricing | |||
| Input $/1M | $0.25 | $2.40 | A +$2.15 |
| Output $/1M | $0.75 | $2.40 | A +$1.65 |
| Blended $/1M (3∶1) | $0.38 | $2.40 | A +$2.02 |
| Speed | |||
| tok/s | - | 45 | — |
| TTFT (s) | - | 0.55 | — |
| 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 | — | 1,180 | — |
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.
Snowflake Arctic Instruct
- Context
- 4K / 4K out
- Parameters
- 480B (17B act.)
- Price
- $2.40 / $2.40
- Speed
- 45 tok/s · 0.55s TTFT
- Modalities
- text → text
- License
- Apache 2.0
480B dense-MoE hybrid tuned for enterprise SQL, coding, and instruction following — Apache 2.0 weights from Snowflake AI Research.
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.