# Inception

> The only commercial diffusion LLMs, generating tokens in parallel for 1,000+ tok/s on standard GPUs.

Canonical: https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/inception · By The Subconscious Team · Updated October 11, 2026

- Founded: 2024
- Example models: Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2
- Website: https://www.inceptionlabs.ai

## Overview

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.

Mercury 2.5, released in September 2026, is the flagship: a reasoning model with tunable reasoning depth, native tool use, JSON mode and a 260K context window, priced at $0.20 in and $0.75 out per million tokens. Inception reports over 1,100 tokens per second in production; Artificial Analysis measures about 640 for Mercury 2.5 and 850 for Mercury 2. Quality sits with cost-optimized models like Claude Haiku 4.5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, not the frontier. The lineup also includes Mercury Voice, tuned for voice agents with time to first token under 170ms, and Mercury Router for routing prompts across models. The API is OpenAI-compatible and also sold through AWS Bedrock, Azure Foundry and OpenRouter, with fine-tuning and private deployments on request.

## Upsides

- Among the fastest output of any hosted LLM, without specialized silicon.
- Low prices for a reasoning model with tool use and 260K context.
- Available on AWS Bedrock and Azure Foundry for teams that buy through a cloud.

## Core use cases

- Latency-critical loops: code autocomplete and edits, voice agents, real-time chat.
- High-volume summarization, extraction and classification where speed drives cost.

## Downsides

- Closed weights from a single lab, so there is no choice of model family.
- Intelligence trails frontier and large open models on hard reasoning and long agent tasks.

## At a glance

| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Model access | Closed weights (Mercury dLLMs) |
| Flagship models | Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2 |
| Speed | 1,100+ tok/s (vendor); ~640 measured |
| Price | $0.20 in, $0.75 out (Mercury 2.5) |
| Customization | Fine-tuning on request |
| Deployment | Serverless API, Bedrock, Azure, private |
| Long context | 260K |

## FAQ

### What is 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.

### What is Inception best for?

Latency-critical loops: code autocomplete and edits, voice agents, real-time chat; High-volume summarization, extraction and classification where speed drives cost.

### How much does Inception cost?

Inception pricing at a glance: $0.20 in, $0.75 out (Mercury 2.5). Rates change often, so check Inception's pricing page before committing.

### How much context does Inception support?

Inception's long-context support: 260K.

### What are the downsides of Inception?

Closed weights from a single lab, so there is no choice of model family; Intelligence trails frontier and large open models on hard reasoning and long agent tasks.

### What are the best alternatives to Inception?

Common alternatives include Subconscious, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock. Each has a head-to-head comparison with Inception on this site.

## Comparisons

- [Subconscious vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-inception.md)
- [OpenAI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/openai-vs-inception.md)
- [Anthropic vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/anthropic-vs-inception.md)
- [Google Vertex AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/google-vertex-vs-inception.md)
- [Amazon Bedrock vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/aws-bedrock-vs-inception.md)
- [Together AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/together-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [Fireworks AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/fireworks-vs-inception.md)
- [Baseten vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/baseten-vs-inception.md)
- [Groq vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/groq-vs-inception.md)
- [Cerebras vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/cerebras-vs-inception.md)
- [DeepInfra vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/deepinfra-vs-inception.md)
- [Hugging Face Inference Providers vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/hugging-face-vs-inception.md)
- [Modal vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/modal-vs-inception.md)
- [Cloudflare Workers AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/cloudflare-workers-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [xAI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/xai-vs-inception.md)
- [Mistral AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/mistral-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [DeepSeek vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/deepseek-vs-inception.md)
- [Moonshot AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/moonshot-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [Z.ai vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/z-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [Alibaba Cloud vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/alibaba-cloud-vs-inception.md)
- [Meta vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/meta-vs-inception.md)
- [Cohere vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/cohere-vs-inception.md)
- [SambaNova vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/sambanova-vs-inception.md)
- [Nebius vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/nebius-vs-inception.md)
- [Crusoe vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/crusoe-vs-inception.md)
- [fal vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/fal-vs-inception.md)
- [Novita AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/novita-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [Venice vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/venice-vs-inception.md)
- [Parasail vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/parasail-vs-inception.md)
- [Inference.net vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/inference-net-vs-inception.md)
- [GMI Cloud vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/gmi-cloud-vs-inception.md)
- [Thinking Machines vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/thinking-machines-vs-inception.md)
- [Sail Research vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/sail-research-vs-inception.md)
- [Morph vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/morph-vs-inception.md)
- [Relace vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/relace-vs-inception.md)
- [TypeSafe AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/typesafe-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [StepFun vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/stepfun-vs-inception.md)
- [Runware vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/runware-vs-inception.md)
- [StreamLake vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/streamlake-vs-inception.md)
- [Wafer vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/wafer-vs-inception.md)
- [RunInfra vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/runinfra-vs-inception.md)
- [Particle.AI vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/particle-ai-vs-inception.md)
- [Luminal vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/luminal-vs-inception.md)
- [Infron vs Inception](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/infron-vs-inception.md)
- [Inception vs Dolphin](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/inception-vs-dolphin.md)

## Sources

- [Inception](https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/)
- [Mercury 2.5 launch, Business Wire](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260908593295/en/Inception-Launches-Mercury-2.5-the-Next-Tier-of-Intelligence-for-Diffusion-LLMs)
- [Inception seed round, TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/inception-raises-50-million-to-build-diffusion-models-for-code-and-text)
- [Inception on Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/providers/inception)

Pricing and model lineups change often; figures are a snapshot.