Inception releases upgraded Mercury dLLM with improved coding and reasoning

This is very exciting. I tried it on OpenRouter, and the speed is really impressive. I compared it with gpt-oss-120B. I would say Mercury was a few times faster. Was it 10x faster? Maybe, I didn't check with a timer, but subjectively, I would say it's at least 3x faster. About the quality: if anything I liked Mercury better. But I think at this point it's just a matter of style preferences. The content was absolutely comparable.

Now, what I tried was some free sample for both models. It looks like if you want to use the models in earnest, you pay $1 per million output tokens for Mercury, and between $0.25 and $0.95 for gpt-oss-120B, with Cerebras getting you a mindblowing 6645 tokens/second for the latter, at $0.65/MM tokens.

Still, Mercury is able to trade punches with freaking OpenAI. That's, in my opinion, quite exciting.

It's done well on coding questions but I asked for a music recommendation and every artist it returned was hallucinated, it started making up musicians starting with the letter M. Far worse than ChatGPT and Claude, at lease they returned some folks I listen to or had heard of in that vein even if they weren't quite in target.

How are the prompting techniques for dLLMs different than LLMs?