ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 2 Inception Labs releases since Feb 2025, most recently Mercury 3 on Oct 22, 2026. Highlights include Mercury 3. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.
Inception Mercury 3: a diffusion LLM claiming 1,000+ tokens/sec
Inception released Mercury 3, a diffusion language model it says runs at more than 1,000 tokens per second with a 1M-token context. These are vendor numbers.
Inception Labs debuts Mercury, a commercial diffusion LLM
Inception Labs announced Mercury, billed as the first commercial-scale diffusion large language model, generating text via diffusion rather than autoregressive decoding. The approach promises dramatically faster token throughput, demoed first with the Mercury Coder playground.
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