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…