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
📖 Read the full source: r/LocalLLaMA
👀 See Also
Yann LeCun's AI Startup Raises $1B in Europe's Largest Seed Round
Yann LeCun's AI startup has raised $1 billion in what is reported to be Europe's largest seed round. The news was shared on Hacker News with 186 points and 107 comments.
Claude Memory Feature Causes Version Reversion: User Loses a Day of Work
A Claude user reports that enabling memory caused the AI to revert to a 2-week-old codebase, undoing an entire day of work. Manual handover transcripts and file uploads were ignored.
Claude Artifacts API Usage Counts Against Chat Quota, Not API Billing
Using Claude artifacts within Claude makes normal API calls that are intercepted by Anthropic and authenticated through the logged-in session, counting against a plan's chat quota rather than API billing. Users can verify this by testing artifacts and checking that API usage remains at zero in the Claude Console.
Benchmarking the Latest AI Models: The Rise of Extreme Models
A detailed benchmarking of 40 new AI models reveals a split market with 'God Mode' and 'Flash Mode' leading the way. Mid-range models are now considered obsolete.