Together AI vs Inception

Together AI

Together AI is the broadest open-model platform in the category. One bill covers per-token serverless inference, batch at up to 50% off, provisioned throughput with a 99% SLA, dedicated deployments, raw GPU clusters, managed fine-tuning and code sandboxes for agents. The text catalog runs past thirty open models, including GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8 and MiniMax M3, plus image, video, speech and embedding models. Token prices sit at parity with Fireworks and Baseten.

Example models: Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

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

Together AI

Choose Together AI for

• Broad open-model catalog
• Fine-tuning and serving on one platform
• Raw GPU clusters

Inception

Choose Inception for

• Very fast output on standard GPUs
• Cheap reasoning with tool use and 260K context
• Buying through AWS Bedrock or Azure