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).

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