Mercury 2: Diffusion-Based Model for Real-Time AI Coding

What Mercury 2 Is

Mercury 2 is a diffusion-based AI model that generates tokens in parallel rather than sequentially, using a process that refines output over multiple steps. This approach differs from traditional autoregressive models that decode tokens one by one.

Technical Specifications

• Generation method: Diffusion-based generation instead of sequential token-by-token decoding
• Processing approach: Generates tokens in parallel and refines them over a few steps
• Performance: Claims 1,009 tokens/sec on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs
• Pricing: $0.25 per 1 million input tokens, $0.75 per 1 million output tokens
• Context window: 128K tokens
• Reasoning capability: Tunable reasoning
• Tool integration: Native tool use with schema-aligned JSON output
• API compatibility: OpenAI API compatible

Target Use Cases

The developers are positioning Mercury 2 for:

• Coding assistants
• Agentic loops (multi-step inference chains)
• Real-time voice systems
• RAG/search pipelines with multi-hop retrieval