Inception says Mercury 3 beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at up to 8x the speed

Diffusion language model startup Inception AI Inc. has released Mercury 3, its new flagship model. In the company’s own benchmarks, Mercury 3 beat OpenAI Group PBC’s GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic PBC’s Claude Haiku 5.5 on eight of 12 tests at four to eight times their speed. The release takes on the main doubt about Inception’s approach. Co-founder and Chief Executive Stefano Ermon said the question the company has heard most since Mercury 1 “is whether diffusion can scale.” As he sees it, the limits come down to “compute and data, not fundamental algorithmic barriers.” GPT-6 Luna and Haiku 5.5 write their answers the conventional way, one token after another. A Mercury model drafts the whole response up front, then refines every position in parallel over a few passes.