ModelInceptionConfirmed
Story 4 of 7 in the Monday 19 October editionInception launches Mercury 3, a diffusion language model
Mercury 3 has a 1M-token context, up from 260k in Mercury 2.5. Inception’s launch price is half the list rate, and the comparisons below are company-reported.
Edited by Ashutosh Shrivastava
20 Oct 2026, 10:10 IST · 2 min read
Inception introduced Mercury 3 on 19 October 2026. It is a diffusion language model: Inception says diffusion follows the same scaling pattern as autoregressive models, which is the account it gives for the speed in the table below. Mercury 3 is on the Inception API and, through the same OpenAI-style requests, on OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel. New API keys include 100 million free tokens.
Inception says Mercury 3 is ahead of GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on a range of tests and behind on others, including a lower DeepSWE v1 score than Claude Haiku 5.5. Those comparisons are company-reported. The table is Inception’s.
Key numbers
- 1M-token context, up from 260k in Mercury 2.5
- List price $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 output, on the models page
- Cached input $0.01 per million tokens at the launch discount
- 100 million free tokens on a new API key
Inception has not said when the launch discount ends. Its models page says Mercury 2 and Mercury 2.5 are closed to new users. Customers who used them before 19 October 2026 keep access until 15 November 2026. Enterprise customers remain on their agreements. The second chart shows Inception’s quality score against size for five Mercury versions, with Mercury 3 at the top.
Sources
- PrimaryDiffusion at Scale, Introducing Mercury 3inceptionlabs.ai · Announcement, 19 October 2026, with the comparison table
- OfficialInception models and pricinginceptionlabs.ai · List and launch prices, and the Mercury 2 cutoff
- On X@_inception_ai on X: Mercury 3 is livex.com · Inception’s launch post, 19 October 2026
The rest of the day
Read the whole day
01ModelMiniMax
MiniMax releases MiniMax-M3.1-Flash with a 1M-token context window
MiniMax-M3.1-Flash has a 1M-token context and costs $0.15 per million input tokens.
02OtherDepartment of Homeland Security
Department of Homeland Security publishes a DeepSeek removal order
A notice filed on 19 October 2026 publishes an order dated 24 July 2026 that tells US civilian agencies to drop DeepSeek products, including tools built with them.
03ProductMicrosoft
Microsoft adds agent containment controls to Project Perception
New controls can narrow what an agent is allowed to do as its risk score changes, including keeping reads while blocking writes.
05Open sourceMeta
Meta publishes the technical report for Muse Glimmer 30B
The report is dated 19 October 2026.
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