Mercury 3 launches on Venice, bringing parallel token generation to private AI

Most chatbots write the way a nervous student fills in an exam: one word at a time, never looking back. Inception Labs is betting that approach is a bottleneck. The company’s new model, Mercury 3, is now live on Venice.ai. It uses a diffusion architecture that generates and refines every token in a response at once, pushing output speeds past 1,000 tokens per second. What Mercury 3 actually does Inception Labs launched Mercury 3 on October 19, 2026. It is the fourth model in the company’s Mercury series. The headline figure is speed. Inception says the model hits 1,068 tokens per second when running on NVIDIA GPUs. Mercury 3 drafts an entire response simultaneously, then sharpens all of it in parallel passes. Speed is not the only spec. Mercury 3 ships with a 1-million-token context window, meaning it can hold a very large amount of text in working memory during a single task. It also supports tool calling, structured outputs and tunable reasoning. Put simply, it can trigger external software, return answers in tidy machine-readable formats, and dial its thinking effort up or down. Benchmarks, pricing and the fine print Inception claims Mercury 3 outperforms or matches OpenAI’s GPT...