Inception · Efficient
Mercury 2.5 Preview
Mercury 2.5 Preview is Inception's latest and most intelligent diffusion language model. Instead of generating tokens strictly one at a time, it produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, reaching up to 1,107 tokens per second on standard GPUs. It delivers a 10+ point intelligence gain over Mercury 2, with tunable reasoning, parallel tool calls, schema-aligned JSON output, and a 260K context window. It is built for latency-sensitive production work such as search agents, voice pipelines, customer support, rapid coding iteration, and coding subagents.
- Reasoning
- Tools
- Structured output
- Parallel tools
- Input
- Text
- Output
- Text
- Reasoning effort
- none · low · medium · high
- Discovery tier
- Efficient
Pricing
USD per 1M tokens- Input
- $0.04
- Output
- $0.15
- Cache read
- $0.004
Reference prices as published by the model provider. API example
Specifications
- Context window
- 260K
- Max output
- 65.5K
- Average output (7 days)
- 1.2K tokens
- Longer than 78% of 465 models
Side by side
Mercury 2.5 Preview compared
Specifications, prices, speed and benchmark scores next to each other. Benchmarks below show every compared model too.
| Mercury 2.5 PreviewInceptionThis model | Mercury 2InceptionRemove | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | Inception |
| Discovery tier | Efficient | Balanced |
| Added | Sep 1, 2026 | Jan 1, 2024 |
| Limits | ||
| Context window | 260KBest | 128K |
| Max output | 65.54KBest | 50K |
| Average output | 1.2K tokens | — |
| Pricing, USD per 1M tokens | ||
| Input | $0.04Best | $0.25 |
| Output | $0.15Best | $0.75 |
| Cache read | $0.004Best | $0.025 |
| Performance | ||
| Request success (24h) | 100.0% | — |
| Benchmark indexes | ||
| Intelligence Index | — | 10.8 |
| Coding Index | — | 31.1 |
| Capabilities | ||
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Tools | Yes | Yes |
| Structured output | Yes | Yes |
| Parallel tools | Yes | No |
| Reasoning effort | none, low, medium, high | — |
Public evaluations
Benchmarks
Independent evaluation results, with how each score ranks among the models in the Noumen catalog.
- Mercury 2.5 Preview
- Mercury 2
Intelligence Index
- Mercury 2.5 Preview—
- Mercury 210.8
Indexes
Coding Index
Composite of the coding evaluations
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 31.1
Agentic work
AutomationBench-AA
Workflow automation, penalized for guardrail violations
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 1.7%
AutomationBench-AA tasks completed
Workflows finished end to end without a guardrail violation
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 0.3%
AA-Briefcasev1.1
Agentic knowledge work, rated head to head
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 265 Elo
GDPval-AAv2.1
Economically valuable occupational tasks, rated head to head
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 494 Elo
Document reasoning
GDP.pdf
Professional reasoning over PDF documents, all-pass rate
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 3.8%
AA-LCRv1.1
Reasoning across long documents
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 43.7%
Reasoning and knowledge
Humanity’s Last Exam
Expert-level questions across academic fields
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 17.1%
GPQA Diamond
Graduate-level science questions
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 77.0%
IFBench
Following precise output instructions
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 69.8%
Coding
Terminal-Benchv4.0
Practical software engineering in a terminal
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 0.0%
SciCode
Scientific computing in Python
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 37.7%
Legacy evaluations
Terminal-Bench Hard
Earlier terminal task suite
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 26.5%
τ²-Bench Telecom
Tool use in a customer-support simulation
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 70.8%
AA-LCR (unversioned)
Long-context reasoning, earlier grading
- Mercury 2.5 Preview: —
- Mercury 2: 43.7%
Scores from Artificial Analysis, updated Oct 26, 2026. Artificial Analysis
Live routing data
Performance and reliability
Recent averages across requests routed for this model. Your own speed depends on prompt length, reasoning effort and load.
- Prompt cache hits
- 0.0%
- About $0.04 per 1M input tokens with caching
- Request success (24h)
- 100.0%
- Reliable
Cache hits are the share of input tokens recently served from a prompt cache across all requests. They are not a forecast of your own hit rate.
- Healthy (98% or more)
- Degraded (90–98%)
- Down (under 90%)
- No requests
Developers
Use it through the API
Noumen’s API is OpenAI-compatible: any Chat Completions client works with a base URL and a key.
curl https://www.noumen.xyz/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $NOUMEN_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "inception/mercury-2.5-preview",
"reasoning_effort": "medium",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Explain this stack trace." }]
}'import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://www.noumen.xyz/api/v1", api_key=os.environ["NOUMEN_API_KEY"])
reply = client.chat.completions.create(
model="inception/mercury-2.5-preview",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain this stack trace."}],
)
print(reply.choices[0].message.content)Inception
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