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Novita AI vs Inception
Novita AI sells a wide, cheap catalog of open models across many modalities. Inception sells a few closed diffusion models built for speed.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Novita AI vs Inception: key differences
Novita serves 200+ open models across LLMs, image, video, speech and embeddings, with LLM prices from $0.02 per million tokens, batch at 50% off, a GPU cloud and dedicated endpoints with LoRA adapters on a 99.5% SLA. It is listed at about 36 tokens per second on DeepSeek V4 Pro. Inception's Mercury 2.5 is a reasoning model with tool use and 260K context at $0.20 in and $0.75 out. Inception reports over 1,100 tokens per second; Artificial Analysis measures about 640.
Novita is the pick for breadth, multimodal work and low prices, with the trade-off of looser serverless SLAs and no HIPAA. Inception is the pick when output speed drives the product, like autocomplete, voice agents or real-time chat, and its cost-optimized quality is enough. It is also sold through AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry.
What Novita AI and Inception do
Novita AI
Novita AI is a San Francisco inference cloud founded in late 2023 by Frank Lewis and Junyu Huang, and it competes on price and breadth. Its serverless API covers 200+ open models across LLMs, image, video, speech, voice cloning and embeddings, with LLM prices starting at $0.02 per million tokens. The API speaks both OpenAI and Anthropic formats. It became an official Hugging Face Inference Partner in April 2026 and was the day-zero launch partner for Google's Gemma 4.
Example models: DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemma 4
Full Novita AI profile
Inception
Inception builds diffusion large language models (dLLMs). Every other LLM on this list generates text one token at a time; Inception's Mercury models start from a rough draft of a whole block and refine it over a few passes, producing many tokens in parallel. That ties speed less to output length and lets the models run fast on ordinary NVIDIA GPUs rather than custom chips. The company was founded by professors from Stanford, UCLA and Cornell behind core work on diffusion, Flash Attention and DPO, and is led by Stanford's Stefano Ermon. It raised a $50M seed in November 2025 led by Menlo Ventures, with Mayfield, M12, NVentures, Snowflake and Databricks, plus Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy as angels.
Example models: Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2
Full Inception profileShould you choose Novita AI or Inception?
Novita AI vs Inception at a glance
| Attribute | Novita AI |  Inception |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Closed weights (Mercury dLLMs) |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemma 4 | Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2 |
| Speed | ~36 tok/s on DeepSeek V4 Pro | 1,100+ tok/s (vendor); ~640 measured |
| Price | From $0.02 per 1M; batch 50% off | $0.20 in, $0.75 out (Mercury 2.5) |
| Customization | Hot-swappable LoRA adapters | Fine-tuning on request |
| Deployment | Serverless, GPU cloud, dedicated | Serverless API, Bedrock, Azure, private |
| Long context | Full 1M on DeepSeek V4 Pro | 260K |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Novita AI and Inception?
Novita AI sells a wide, cheap catalog of open models across many modalities. Inception sells a few closed diffusion models built for speed.
When should I choose Novita AI over Inception?
Cheap access to many open models; Image, video and speech on one bill; Batch jobs at 50% off.
When should I choose Inception over Novita AI?
Very fast text output; Voice agents and code autocomplete; Buying through Bedrock or Azure.
Is Novita AI or Inception cheaper?
Novita AI: From $0.02 per 1M; batch 50% off. Inception: $0.20 in, $0.75 out (Mercury 2.5). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Which has more context, Novita AI or Inception?
Novita AI: Full 1M on DeepSeek V4 Pro. Inception: 260K.
Related comparisons
Running long-horizon agents?
If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious. Our inference stack treats a long-horizon trace as the primary workload, so speed, cost, and accuracy hold up deep into the trace.