# Inception — Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3

- Company: Inception (inceptionlabs.ai)
- Announced: 2026-10-19
- Category: new-model
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: models
- Source: https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3
- Record: https://forck.live/items/24653-diffusion-at-scale-introducing-mercury-3
- Subject: Mercury
- Models affected: Mercury 3, Mercury 1, Mercury 2.5, Mercury Voice, Mercury Decide
- Context window: 1M tokens
- Pricing: $0.20 per million input and $0.70 per million output tokens; at launch 50% off at $0.10 per 1M input and $0.35 per 1M output; cached tokens 90% off the input price

Inception released Mercury 3, which it calls the most capable diffusion-based LLM to date, claiming it outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 while running 4–8x faster at over 1,000 tokens per second. The company says Mercury 3 is more than 40x larger than Mercury 1 and answers the open question of whether diffusion LLMs can scale to compete with autoregressive models on complex use cases. Inception reports that intelligence across standard benchmarks has risen 3x from Mercury 1 (mini) to Mercury 3, and that the scaling laws behind autoregressive progress hold for diffusion too. Mercury 3 carries a 1M token context window, up from 260K for Mercury 2.5, and is priced at $0.20 per million input and $0.70 per million output tokens, with a launch discount of 50% bringing it to $0.10 and $0.35. It is available today on the Inception API Platform and through OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel, is OpenAI API compatible, and comes with 100 million free tokens for API trials. Early-access partners including TinyFish AI, RevisionDojo, Octen AI and Lorikeet describe using it for web navigation, tutoring, search and customer support; Inception says Mercury 3 completed 50% of 50 live Mind2Web navigation tasks, more than GPT-6.1-Sol, at a fraction of the per-token cost.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3:

> Price: $0.20 per million input and $0.70 per million output tokens.
> 
> At launch, Mercury 3 is 50% off at $0.10 per 1M input and $0.35 per 1M output. Cached tokens are 90% off the input price.

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Record: https://forck.live/items/24653-diffusion-at-scale-introducing-mercury-3
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