Inception ships Mercury 2.5, a diffusion LLM claiming 40% higher intelligence at 1,107 tokens/sec

thione · x · 2026-09-15

• Inception (CEO Stefano Ermon) released Mercury 2.5, billed as the most capable and largest diffusion LLM ever trained, with 40% higher intelligence than Mercury 2, comparable to cost-optimized frontier models like GPT-5.6 Luna (Low), Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and Claude Haiku 4.5.
• Key specs: 1,107 tokens/sec on commodity NVIDIA GPUs, 260K context, $0.20/M input and $0.75/M output (80% launch discount: $0.04/$0.15).
• Supports tunable reasoning, parallel tool calls, schema-aligned JSON; usage has grown over an order of magnitude since Mercury 2, and 2.5 was trained from production failure cases.
• The post also references DeepMind's AlphaGenome Atlas launch (covered separately).

Original post →

More from Models

• Gemini 4 tops public coding benchmarks but drops to bottom on private tasks — Hesamation · 2026-10-30
• Your AI agent would cost 260% more without prompt caching, Arena data shows — arena · 2026-10-30
• EachLabs launches Lockstep recast model claiming 75% cost cut and better quality — miilesus · 2026-10-30
• ChatGPT cited a 300+ page government legal PDF it retrieved on its own — lilyraynyc · 2026-10-30
• Best MLX model for French-to-English translation on an M2 Mac? — greenreddits · 2026-10-30
• AI-driven cyber ops near the sophistication peak set by GTG-1002's Claude Code campaign — Jsevillamol · 2026-10-30

Models channel →