Inception launches Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM that generates 1,068 tokens per second. Image: Inception

Delays add up when an AI agent needs multiple model calls to complete a task.

Inception introduced Mercury 3 on Oct. 19, claiming faster text generation and competitive benchmark performance against models from OpenAI and Anthropic. For developers building customer support, search and browser agents, the practical question is whether that speed translates into faster successful tasks at an acceptable cost.

Unlike conventional autoregressive models, which generate text one token at a time, diffusion models can generate and refine multiple tokens in parallel.…