Model comparison
Inkling vs Mercury
Inkling is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.
Last verified . 8 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. Inkling scores higher in 5 categories and Mercury in 1 category; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Inkling leads 40.4 to 17.5.
- Inkling has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Inkling | Mercury | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Thinking Machines Lab | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 44.1 | 37.6 |
| Released | 2026-07-15 | — |
| Weights | Open | Proprietary |
| Context window | 66K | — |
| Max output | 66K | — |
| Input $ / M tokens | $1.87 | — |
| Output $ / M tokens | $4.68 | — |
| Results tracked | 41 | 9 |
Sponsored placements are available on pages like this one. Advertise on Noometry
Category by category
Coding Mercury leads
Inkling: 34.5 (#234), Mercury: 38.7 (#170)
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1464 | 1322 |
| FrontierCode | 14% | — |
| LMArena WebDev | 1413 | — |
| FrontierSWE | 4.1% | — |
| SciCode | 47% | — |
| WeirdML | 32.3% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 946 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Inkling: 29.6 (#85), Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 33.8% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 25% | — |
Reasoning Inkling leads
Inkling: 40.4 (#56), Mercury: 17.5 (#293)
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1451 | 1285 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 36.5% | — |
| SimpleBench | 50% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 21.6% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 79.5% | — |
| CritPt | 5.4% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 21% | — |
| DTBench | 87.5% | — |
| LMCA | 37.6% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 148.54 | — |
Math Not comparable
Inkling: 31.3 (#225), Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 33.3% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 4.9% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 88.9% | — |
| ProofBench | 0% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1479 | — |
Knowledge Not comparable
Inkling: 55.1 (#49), Mercury: —
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 88.3% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 40.3% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1465 | — |
Multilingual Inkling leads
Inkling: 54.0 (#52), Mercury: 41.6 (#206)
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1434 | 1260 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1490 | — |
| LMArena French | 1458 | — |
| LMArena German | 1446 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1429 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1404 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1429 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1448 | — |
Instruction Following Inkling leads
Inkling: 75.1 (#71), Mercury: 65.2 (#224)
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1426 | 1239 |
Long Context Inkling leads
Inkling: 43.8 (#86), Mercury: 38.4 (#198)
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1434 | 1266 |
Writing & Preference Inkling leads
Inkling: 65.2 (#51), Mercury: 46.2 (#221)
| Benchmark | Inkling | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1441 | 1282 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1387 | 1191 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1436 | 1282 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1611 | — |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1226 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Inkling better than Mercury?
Inkling is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.1 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.
Is Inkling or Mercury better for coding?
Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 34.5 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Inkling and Mercury share?
8 benchmarks have published results for both models. Inkling has 41 scored results on Noometry and Mercury has 9.