GPT-5.2 Chat vs Mercury 2.5 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.
GPT-5.2 Chat — full profile › · Mercury 2.5 — full profile ›
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
| Spec | GPT-5.2 Chat | Mercury 2.5 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | OpenAI | Inception | – |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
| Context window | 128K tokens | 260K tokens | INMercury 2.5 |
| Input price | $1.75/M | $0.04/M | INMercury 2.5 |
| Output price | $14/M | $0.15/M | INMercury 2.5 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | No | |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | No (API only) | No (API only) | – |
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary | – |
Mercury 2.5 is ~93× cheaper than GPT-5.2 Chat on output tokens ($0.15 vs $14 per M tokens).
| Capability | GPT-5.2 Chat | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✗ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✗ |
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
| Criterion | GPT-5.2 Chat | Mercury 2.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 3.5 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 3.5 | 4.0 |
| Openness | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 5.0 | 3.5 |
Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.
GPT-5.2 Chat (AKA Instant) is the fast, lightweight member of the 5.2 family, optimized for low-latency chat while retaining strong general intelligence. It uses adaptive reasoning to selectively “think” on...
Mercury 2.5 is the fastest reasoning LLM, and the latest diffusion LLM (dLLM) from Inception. Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2.5 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...
Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on output ($0.15/M vs $14/M).
Mercury 2.5 offers the larger context window (260K tokens).
Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $14/M). It also gives you the larger 260K context window.
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