Mercury Coder

Mercury Edit 2 is part of Inception Labs’ Mercury family of AI models, designed to perform high-speed reasoning, coding, and editing tasks using a fundamentally different architecture from traditional large language models. It builds on Mercury 2, a diffusion-based reasoning model that generates and refines entire outputs in parallel rather than producing text token by token, enabling significantly faster performance and more responsive editing workflows. Instead of acting like a sequential “typewriter,” the system behaves more like an editor, starting with a rough draft and iteratively improving it across multiple tokens at once, which allows for real-time interaction and rapid iteration in tasks such as code editing, content generation, and agent-based workflows. This architecture delivers throughput of up to around 1,000 tokens per second, making it several times faster than conventional models while maintaining competitive reasoning quality across benchmarks.

Mercury 2 is the first reasoning model fast enough to pick up the phone, a reasoning diffusion language model built for real-time voice agents. Instead of making callers wait through seconds of dead air while an autoregressive model generates thinking tokens one by one, Mercury 2 uses a diffusion large language model architecture to generate tokens in parallel, decoding 1000+ tokens per second on standard NVIDIA GPUs. That speed is fast enough to run a full reasoning pass and start speaking within the latency budget of a natural conversation, reducing the cost of reasoning from seconds of silence to roughly 300 milliseconds. Mercury models work by corrupting clean text into noise, then training a standard Transformer to reverse the process and predict clean text across all positions simultaneously. Because each denoising pass touches many tokens, generation uses the GPU more efficiently than one-token-at-a-time decoding, making custom-silicon-like speed possible on NVIDIA H100s.