Noometry

Model comparison

Claude 3 Opus vs Mercury 2

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.1 to 29.5 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 12 shared benchmarks.

Claude 3 Opus Anthropic

29.5

Rank #310 Confirmed

Mercury 2 Inception

39.1

Rank #175 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 12 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Opus scores higher in 0 categories and Mercury 2 in 7 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in knowledge, where Mercury 2 leads 36.2 to 24.5.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is WeirdML: 19.2% for Claude 3 Opus and 43.2% for Mercury 2.

Side by side

Claude 3 OpusMercury 2
ProviderAnthropicInception
Noometry Index29.539.1
Released2024-02-292026-02-20
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window—128K
Max output—50K
Input $ / M tokens—$0.25
Output $ / M tokens—$0.75
Results tracked4617

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Category by category

Coding Too close to call

Claude 3 Opus: 32.9 (#267), Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
WeirdML19.2%43.2%
LMArena Coding12641391
LMArena WebDev—1171
SciCode—38.7%
BigCodeBench Instruct45.5%—
LiveBench Coding38.6%—
BigCodeBench Complete57.4%—
ALE-Bench—785.58
HumanEval+77.4%—
MBPP+73.3%—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude 3 Opus: 24.6 (#116), Mercury 2: —

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
Cybench10%—
METR Time Horizons29.5%—

Reasoning Mercury 2 leads

Claude 3 Opus: 14.6 (#324), Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Hard Prompts12451362
SimpleBench23.5%—
CritPt—0.8%
Chess Puzzles5%—
EnigmaEval0.8%—
LiveBench Reasoning40.6%—
DTBench61.6%—
LiveBench Data Analysis57.9%—
LMCA17%—
Epoch Capabilities Index126.91—
ForecastBench58.4—
LiveBench49.2%—
WinoGrande88.5%—

Math Not comparable

Claude 3 Opus: 14.8 (#299), Mercury 2: —

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-20254.7%—
LiveBench Math43.6%—
LMArena Math1273—
MATH Level 537.5%—

Knowledge Mercury 2 leads

Claude 3 Opus: 24.5 (#267), Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Expert12231358
GPQA Diamond47.2%—
SimpleQA Verified12.6%—
Confabulations22.7%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate—12.3%
MMLU84.6%—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude 3 Opus: 27.1 (#116), Mercury 2: —

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Vision1023—

Multilingual Mercury 2 leads

Claude 3 Opus: 41.4 (#207), Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Non-English12581331
LMArena Chinese12481417
LMArena Russian12801304
LMArena French1275—
LMArena German1258—
LMArena Japanese1204—
LMArena Korean1187—
LMArena Spanish1246—

Instruction Following Mercury 2 leads

Claude 3 Opus: 64.1 (#228), Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Instruction Following12481329
LiveBench Instruction Following63.9%—

Long Context Mercury 2 leads

Claude 3 Opus: 38.2 (#202), Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Longer Query12591330

Writing & Preference Mercury 2 leads

Claude 3 Opus: 47.2 (#213), Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155)

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusMercury 2
LMArena Text12621355
LMArena Creative Writing12351289
LMArena Multi-Turn12751358
LiveBench Language50.4%—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude 3 Opus better than Mercury 2?

Mercury 2 is the stronger model overall, scoring 39.1 to 29.5 on the Noometry Index.

Is Claude 3 Opus or Mercury 2 better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (32.9 vs 33.5); test both on your own repository before choosing.

How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Opus and Mercury 2 share?

12 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Opus has 46 scored results on Noometry and Mercury 2 has 17.

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