Inception launches Mercury 3 diffusion language model

Oct 19, 2026
Mercury 3 delivers more than 1,000 tokens per second, a 1 million token context window and API pricing starting at $0.20 per million input tokens.

Inception Labs announced Mercury 3 in a press release, saying the diffusion language model runs at more than 1,000 tokens per second on widely available NVIDIA GPUs. The model has a 1 million token context window and is more than 40 times the size of Mercury 1.

Inception says Mercury 3 outperformed GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 across several benchmarks while running four to eight times faster. Diffusion models generate multiple tokens in parallel, rather than producing text one token at a time.

Mercury 3 is available through the Inception API, Baseten, OpenRouter and Vercel. Standard pricing is $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens, with launch prices of $0.10 and $0.35 respectively. The model supports the OpenAI API format.

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