Are Inception's Mercury Models Faster Than Haiku?

Stefano Ermon says Inception's Mercury models are on par with the Haiku models, the Flash models, and OpenAI's mini and nano models on benchmarks, while being significantly faster. Inception is serving those diffusion-based language models in production.

Getting diffusion to write text took new research. Image diffusion denoises continuous data, and two pixel colors can still be interpolated. Two words do not have a point between them, so the same idea had to be extended to discrete objects. Once that worked, Mercury moved from a research prototype to a model customers use.

Diffusion language models cannot run on vLLM or SGLang. Inception built its own serving engine so it can handle production workloads and deliver the models to customers.