Mercury 2.5

Mercury 2.5

inceptionlabs.ai102 pointsby Topfi54 comments

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  • Ridiculously fast on OpenRouter, just subjectively it's a really strange experience because I've never seen a model respond or execute that quickly.
  • Inception is one of the most interesting neolabs with their diffusion-based architectures. My understanding is that their primary business is low latency voice applications but they are seriously pursuing coding.

    We tested Mercury 2.5 Preview, which is nowhere close to the frontier (and not advertised as such), but it's actually usable as a general-purpose chatbot. It's comparable in problem solving ability to some last-gen open weights models, and the price and cost make it compelling. However, they have not figured out general purpose tool use and agentic coding (their model performs worse on our problems when given a custom harness). If they do, I see a lot of real-time applications that the speed and cost will enable.

  • I’m using this model to „rerank” results from vector store. The model is provided a set of results and asked to produce a string of 1s and 0s where the offset reflects the position in the result set. The prompt goes along the line „do this set of result match the provided query X”. Works like a charm, normally I would use a small non reasoning model, but given how Mercury produces the output its blazingly fast - which is what I was optimizing for - not to increase the search latency. It helped improving our search in a way that reranker could get close to.
  • This team is in a tough spot - they'll need to innovate and get their models in a good spot quickly. They are racing the clock against various similarly sized models being burned into ASICs and running at a similar speed (or faster).
  • Diffusion is already being used in Drafter in many LLMs.

    many people are running Qwen 3.8 27b on TPU at 130tk/s for free on Kaggle TPUs:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Qwen_AI/comments/1w6gv32/qwen3827b_...

    I wonder if we are going to see boxes appear soon, which can run these models for dirt cheap.

  • I like the model.

    FYI:

    "If you do not want us to use your User Submissions to train our models, you can opt-out by setting the ‘Improve the model for everyone’ option under User Settings in the API Platform to OFF."

  • I tried at it creative writing - and, with thinking off, it was considerably better than Mercury 2 and generally good in fact, not very sloppy. Now with thinking on, it got worse, began hallucinating things; this is something I've noticed with all recent models - enabling reasoning causes hallucinations in creative writing assignments.
  • Got my hopes up when it said widely available GPUs that it would be open weights but it doesn’t seem like it sadly

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