Noometry

Model comparison

Mercury vs o4-mini

o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 9 shared benchmarks.

Mercury Inception

37.6

Rank #199 Confirmed

o4-mini OpenAI

41.6

Rank #132 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 9 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury scores higher in 0 categories and o4-mini in 6 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in instruction following, where o4-mini leads 75.2 to 65.2.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 21.6% for Mercury and 67.6% for o4-mini.

Side by side

Mercuryo4-mini
ProviderInceptionOpenAI
Noometry Index37.641.6
Released—2025-04-16
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window—200K
Max output—100K
Input $ / M tokens—$1.10
Output $ / M tokens—$4.40
Results tracked960

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Category by category

Coding o4-mini leads

Mercury: 38.7 (#170), o4-mini: 40.9 (#127)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
LMArena Coding13221368
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)—45%
Aider Polyglot—72%
GSO—3.6%
WeirdML—52.6%
CadEval—62%
ALE-Bench—826.17
AlgoTune—1.72

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Mercury: —, o4-mini: 32.6 (#61)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard—53.2%
GDPval—25.3%
METR Time Horizons—63.9%

Reasoning o4-mini leads

Mercury: 17.5 (#293), o4-mini: 24.6 (#162)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
Kagi LLM Benchmark21.6%67.6%
LMArena Hard Prompts12851351
ARC-AGI-2—6.1%
SimpleBench—38.7%
ARC-AGI-1—58.7%
CritPt—0.6%
Chess Puzzles—26%
EnigmaEval—9.2%
Mystery Game Puzzles—5%
DTBench—77.6%
LMCA—26.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index—145.64
ForecastBench—61.8

Math Not comparable

Mercury: —, o4-mini: 40.8 (#89)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)—36.1%
FrontierMath Tier 4—4.9%
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—81.7%
Omni-MATH—72%
LMArena Math—1389
MATH Level 5—97.8%
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)—24.8%
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)—6.3%

Knowledge Not comparable

Mercury: —, o4-mini: 43.6 (#91)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
GPQA Diamond—79.6%
Humanity's Last Exam—18.1%
SimpleQA Verified—19.6%
MMLU-Pro—82%
Confabulations—15.8%
Vectara Hallucination Rate—18.6%
GPQA (HELM)—73.5%
LMArena Expert—1343

Multimodal Not comparable

Mercury: —, o4-mini: 40.2 (#49)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
LMArena Vision—1194
GeoBench—64%
VPCT—57.5%

Multilingual o4-mini leads

Mercury: 41.6 (#206), o4-mini: 47.0 (#154)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
LMArena Non-English12601337
LMArena Chinese—1354
LMArena French—1364
LMArena German—1336
LMArena Japanese—1308
LMArena Korean—1312
LMArena Russian—1334
LMArena Spanish—1347

Instruction Following o4-mini leads

Mercury: 65.2 (#224), o4-mini: 75.2 (#68)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
LMArena Instruction Following12391321
IFEval—92.8%

Long Context o4-mini leads

Mercury: 38.4 (#198), o4-mini: 45.5 (#33)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
LMArena Longer Query12661315
Fiction.LiveBench—77.8%

Writing & Preference o4-mini leads

Mercury: 46.2 (#221), o4-mini: 54.0 (#152)

BenchmarkMercuryo4-mini
LMArena Text12821353
LMArena Creative Writing11911294
LMArena Multi-Turn12821350
Short-Story Creative Writing—75%
WildBench—85.4%

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury better than o4-mini?

o4-mini is the stronger model overall, scoring 41.6 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.

Is Mercury or o4-mini better for coding?

o4-mini scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.9 versus 38.7 in the Noometry coding category.

How many benchmarks do Mercury and o4-mini share?

9 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury has 9 scored results on Noometry and o4-mini has 60.

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