Inception says its Mercury 3 model beats GPT-6 Luna and runs far faster

Inception, the Redwood City AI lab, released Mercury 3 on Monday. It is the newest version of what the company calls a diffusion LLM, a design that differs from the systems behind most chatbots. Most language models are autoregressive. They write one token at a time, each one chosen after the last. A diffusion model works more like the image generators that share the name. It starts with rough, noisy output and refines many tokens at once, in parallel, until the text resolves. Inception says that parallel approach is why its model runs faster. On the company’s own benchmarks, Mercury 3 beats OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 and Zhipu’s GLM-5.3 Flash across a range of tests, while running four to eight times faster.