inference-speed
2 articles
Typewriter vs Editor: Mercury 2 Reinvents LLMs with Diffusion — 5x Faster Reasoning, 4x Cheaper
Inception Labs launched Mercury 2, a reasoning Diffusion LLM that refines whole passages in parallel instead of generating one token at a time. It claims 1,008 tokens/sec, 5x Claude 4.5 Haiku speed, and one-quarter the price.
Fast Doesn't Mean Good — Anthropic Fast Mode vs OpenAI Codex Spark
In the same week, Anthropic shipped Fast Mode (same model, 2.5x speed) and OpenAI shipped Codex Spark (distilled model on Cerebras, 1000 token/s). One bets on accuracy, the other on instant interaction. This isn't a speed race — it's a product philosophy showdown.