Mercury
The first commercial diffusion LLM — generates text in parallel blocks instead of token by token.
About
Mercury, announced by Inception Labs in February 2025, is the first commercial-grade diffusion large language model. Rather than emitting one token at a time, it refines whole blocks of tokens in parallel, which the company says yields 5–10x faster generation — over 1,000 tokens per second — at comparable quality. The first release targets coding (Mercury Coder), and all speed claims are vendor-reported; weights are not open, access is API-only.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
Vendor-reported: 1,000+ tokens/sec on coding tasks; quality claims not independently verified at launch.
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Announced Feb 2025 by Inception Labs; first commercial diffusion LLM; Proprietary — API only, no open weights; 1,000+ tok/s speed claims are vendor-reported. License: Proprietary; no public weights..
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Announced Feb 2025 by Inception Labs; first commercial diffusion LLM
- · Proprietary — API only, no open weights
- · 1,000+ tok/s speed claims are vendor-reported