# Inception — Mercury 3

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## Model

- Name: Mercury 3
- Company: Inception (inceptionlabs.ai)
- Launch post: Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3 — https://forck.live/items/24653-diffusion-at-scale-introducing-mercury-3
- Announced: 2026-10-19
- Launch source: https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3
- Launch chosen by: the earliest dated release post naming it
- Released (per models.dev): 2026-10-16
- Listed (per OpenRouter): 2026-10-16
- Open weights: no
- Posts about it: 1
- Outlets named under its posts: 6
- OpenRouter id: inception/mercury-3 — https://openrouter.ai/inception/mercury-3
- Context window: 1M tokens — from https://forck.live/items/24653-diffusion-at-scale-introducing-mercury-3
- Price: $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 — from https://forck.live/items/24653-diffusion-at-scale-introducing-mercury-3

## Posts about it

_Inception's own posts whose title names Mercury 3, and its launch post, in the record's order: dated newest first, undated last. The record reads the newest 50 first-party posts mentioning the model, every company's together, so a model mentioned more often than that lists the newest of them._

Every entry is one first-party announcement, and carries the same eight fields
in this order before any others:

    Company · Announced · Category · Coverage · Announcement · Group · Source · Record

`Source` is the company's own page the announcement was traced to and `Record`
is this site's page for it. Both are safe to cite.

`Coverage` is a number of outlets, or `not counted` — which means this record
reached no count of its own, never that nobody wrote about it.

`Category` is this tracker's own analysis, and is authoritative wherever it is
stated. `not stated` means either that nothing has analysed the post yet or
that the analysis placed it outside this taxonomy; neither is a verdict about
the announcement.

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entry itself so it holds where the groups are headings and where they are not.
One of: `models`, `covered`, `announcements`, `routine`.

Anything after `Record` is held detail that only some announcements carry.

### 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

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.

## Who reported on it

_Outlets this record can name and link, under the first-party post each one covered. Their number is `Outlets named under its posts` above, and the rows are not totalled again. A post's own `Coverage` can be higher: it counts outlets the signal saw that this record cannot name and link._

### On: Diffusion at Scale: Introducing Mercury 3

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

- The Decoder — Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait (2026-10-21T14:45:45+00:00): https://the-decoder.com/inceptions-mercury-3-diffusion-model-claims-to-beat-gpt-6-luna-and-claude-haiku-5-5-at-a-fraction-of-the-wait/
- MarkTechPost — Inception Releases Mercury 3 Diffusion LLM at 1,068 Tokens per Second (2026-10-20T03:32:43+00:00): https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/10/19/inception-mercury-3-diffusion-llm/
- RuntimeWire — Inception launches Mercury 3 at 1,068 tokens per second (2026-10-19T17:06:00+00:00): https://runtimewire.com/article/inception-mercury-3-diffusion-llm-launch
- Forkast — Inception’s Mercury 3 Undercuts the Speed-Optimized Frontier at 1,068 Tokens per Second: https://forkast.news/inceptions-mercury-3-undercuts-the-speed-optimized-frontier-at-1068-tokens-per-second
- The Neuron — Mercury 3 Review: Inception's Diffusion AI Put to the Test: https://theneuron.ai/news/mercury-3-review-diffusion-language-models
- Thenextweb — Inception's Mercury 3: a diffusion model built for speed: https://thenextweb.com/news/inception-mercury-3-diffusion-llm

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Record: https://forck.live/models/mercury-3
Catalogue: https://forck.live/llms.txt
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