Home › Frontier and closed › inception
Mercury 3 inception
Release timeline
Stages observed by the nightly radar: announced → API only → weights public → served by third parties. Each entry carries the source it was seen at.
- 2026-10-16 · API only source seeded from the earliest dated observation when first seen · observed 2026-10-23 18:57 UTC
- next · Next expected: additional third-party providers (closed weights; none expected on Hugging Face)
Description
Mercury 3 is a diffusion-based language model from Inception, and the lab's most capable model to date. It is suited for agentic workflows and real-time applications where latency compounds, such...
via OpenRouter listing · observed 2026-10-24 21:26 UTC. The listing text is the provider's own description, not an assessment.
Where to run 1 providers · 1 endpoints
Hosted endpoints observed for Mercury 3, sorted by input price (USD per million tokens). Each row names its observer and date; prices change daily, so check the source before quoting. Cheapest observed input price: $0.10/M.
| Provider | Model ref | Context | Quant | $/M in | $/M out | tok/s | TTFT | Tools | Status | Observed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inception openrouter | inception/mercury-3 | 977K | unknown | $0.10 | $0.35 | — | — | yes | live | 2026-10-24 |
No third-party providers observed beyond the lab's own endpoints. Cache-read price $0.01/M (source, observed 2026-10-24).
Facts
| Context length | 1,000,000 tokens (977K) · OpenRouter listing |
|---|---|
| Modalities | text → text |
| Max completion tokens | 131,072 |
| Supported parameters | include_reasoning, max_tokens, reasoning, reasoning_effort, response_format, stop, structured_outputs, temperature, tool_choice, tools |
| Openness | Closed weights · closed lab |
| Stage | API only |
| Confidence | medium |
| Pricing (USD per M tokens) |
in $0.10 · out $0.35 · cache read $0.01 OpenRouter list price (cheapest live endpoint) · source · observed 2026-10-24 21:26 UTC |
Open alternatives 5
Nearest open-weights models by modality, context and price on this watch list. Not a quality ranking.
| Model | Org | Params | Context | $/M in | License | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.3 | zai-org | 753B | 1M | $0.07 | other | similar context (1.05M), cheaper input price ($0.075/M vs $0.1/M) |
| Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct | meta-llama | 8.03B | — | — | llama3 | closest by rank, context and price |
| DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 | deepseek-ai | 304B | 1M | $0.04 | mit | similar context (1.05M), cheaper input price ($0.0422/M vs $0.1/M) |
| DeepSeek-V4-Pro | deepseek-ai | 1.60T | 1M | $0.21 | mit | similar context (1.05M) |
| GLM-5.2 | zai-org | 753B | 1M | $0.03 | mit | similar context (1.05M), cheaper input price ($0.0341/M vs $0.1/M) |
Get alerts
Watch the release radar
- /feeds/upcoming.xml(RSS 2.0) · upcoming and just-released models, one item per entry
- /feeds/upcoming.json(JSON Feed 1.1) · same, JSON Feed 1.1
Email alerts are not open yet; the feeds above are the same data. See feeds for the item schema.
Sources
- openrouter inception/mercury-3 · observed 2026-10-24 21:26 UTC
Radar run: 2026-10-25 06:51 UTC · Last verified 2026-10-25 06:51 UTC