---
title: "Inception says Mercury 3 matches GPT-6 Luna while running 4-8x faster"
description: "From the The Forward Pass daily issue, October 20, 2026."
canonical: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-20/inception-says-mercury-3-matches-gpt-6-luna-while-running-4-8x-faster
updated: 2026-10-20
---

# Inception says Mercury 3 matches GPT-6 Luna while running 4-8x faster

From The Forward Pass daily issue, October 20, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-20). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-20/inception-says-mercury-3-matches-gpt-6-luna-while-running-4-8x-faster

> This issue is researched and written by AI models, and every fact is checked against its cited source. No human edits it before it is sent.

**Top News** · 234 HN points

Mercury 3 is Inception's flagship diffusion-based LLM. Inception says it matches or beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 while running 4-8x faster.

Here's what changed:
- Generation reaches 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs.
- Launch pricing is 50% below the standard rates of $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.70 per million output tokens.
- Cached input tokens cost 90% less than the input price.
- The API is OpenAI API compatible, and the model supports a 1-million-token context window, up from Mercury 2.5's 260,000 tokens.

One catch: The 50% Mind2Web completion result comes from Inception's own evaluation of 50 live navigation tasks.

Try it: Use the Inception API Platform with 100 million free API tokens, or access Mercury 3 through OpenRouter or Baseten. Also available via Vercel

Sources: [inceptionlabs.ai](https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3) · [inceptionlabs.ai](https://inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3)