# GPT-3.5-turbo vs Mercury

> Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 23.2 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/gpt-3-5-turbo-vs-mercury
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 8

## Summary

- They share 8 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-3.5-turbo scores higher in 0 categories and Mercury in 6 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Mercury leads 46.2 to 25.3.

## Snapshot

| | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Inception |
| Noometry Index | 23.2 | 37.6 |
| Rank | 350 | 199 |
| Context | 16K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.50 | — |
| Output $/M | $1.50 | — |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 23.9 (#331)
- Mercury: 38.7 (#170)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1136 | 1322 |
| WeirdML | 3.5% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 39.1% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 50.6% | — |
| HumanEval+ | 70.7% | — |
| MBPP+ | 69.7% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- GPT-3.5-turbo: —
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| METR Time Horizons | 21.5% | — |

## Reasoning

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 13.8 (#332)
- Mercury: 17.5 (#293)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1108 | 1285 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 21.6% |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 3% | — |
| DTBench | 48.5% | — |
| LMCA | 9.7% | — |
| Adversarial NLI | 58.1% | — |
| BIG-Bench Hard | 61.6% | — |
| CommonsenseQA 2.0 | 57% | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 118.55 | — |
| ForecastBench | 50.4 | — |
| WinoGrande | 81.6% | — |

## Math

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 6.3 (#327)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 0% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.2% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1142 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 15.9% | — |
| GSM8K | 57.8% | — |

## Knowledge

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 10.0 (#303)
- Mercury: —

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 28% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1070 | — |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 87.4% | — |
| BoolQ | 87% | — |
| MMLU | 71.4% | — |
| OpenBookQA | 86% | — |
| TriviaQA | 85.8% | — |

## Multilingual

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 31.5 (#258)
- Mercury: 41.6 (#206)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1108 | 1260 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1075 | — |
| LMArena French | 1118 | — |
| LMArena German | 1090 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1043 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1019 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1123 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1121 | — |

## Instruction Following

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 57.9 (#262)
- Mercury: 65.2 (#224)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1119 | 1239 |

## Long Context

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 34.0 (#254)
- Mercury: 38.4 (#198)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1121 | 1266 |

## Writing & Preference

- GPT-3.5-turbo: 25.3 (#305)
- Mercury: 46.2 (#221)

| Benchmark | GPT-3.5-turbo | Mercury |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1125 | 1282 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1092 | 1191 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1117 | 1282 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 451 | — |

## FAQ

### Is GPT-3.5-turbo better than Mercury?

Mercury is the stronger model overall, scoring 37.6 to 23.2 on the Noometry Index.

### Is GPT-3.5-turbo or Mercury better for coding?

Mercury scores higher on coding benchmarks: 38.7 versus 23.9 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do GPT-3.5-turbo and Mercury share?

8 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-3.5-turbo has 44 scored results on Noometry and Mercury has 9.