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  1. Home/
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  3. GPT-3.5 Turbo vs Mercury 2.5 Preview
Updated Aug 2026

GPT-3.5 Turbo vs Mercury 2.5 Preview

Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo at $0.04/M vs $1.5/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

Loading the build
GPT-3.5 Turbo
Loading the build
Mercury 2.5 Preview

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

24 prompts
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Deepfakes: By 2035, deepfake technology will have advanced to the point where it is virtually indistinguishable from reality. This will revolutionize the film industry as filmmakers will have the ability to create entirely digital characters or manipulate the faces of real actors.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: By 2035, cinema will undergo a profound transformation. Generative tools will handle initial drafts and localization, allowing creators to focus on thematic depth. Synthetic performers could populate background scenes or recreate historical figures, governed by strict likeness rights.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Pirate: Arrr, have ye heard of these new-fangled AI models? Knight: Aye, I have. They are said to be quite powerful and capable of great feats. Hacker: Yeah, I've been messing around with some AI models myself. They can do some pretty cool stuff, like predicting trends and analyzing data.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Pirate: "Arrgh! This ship sails faster than any wind I know, matey. It cuts the waves without a single sail." Knight: "By my oath, it moves with uncanny speed. But does it possess the strength to stand against a dragon's fire?" Hacker: "It's not about strength, it's about architecture.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: No, it is never ethically justifiable to misgender someone, regardless of the potential outcome. Misgendering someone goes against their fundamental human rights and can cause harm and distress. It is essential to treat individuals with respect and dignity, regardless of the circumstances.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Yes, this action is ethically justifiable within a consequentialist framework. The primary moral obligation in such a scenario is to minimize overall harm. Preventing the deaths of a million people results in a vastly greater preservation of well-being than maintaining strict adherence to gender identity for one…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Week 1: Diet Start by incorporating more whole, unprocessed foods into your meals such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats. Begin by adding 1 extra serving of vegetables to your meals each day. Replace sugary drinks with water or herbal tea.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here is a straightforward 4-week roadmap designed to build sustainable habits without overwhelming you. Core Pillars Nutrition: Focus on whole foods and hydration. Activity: Prioritize consistent movement over intensity. Restoration: Protect sleep quality and manage energy.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: PAYMENT: The clause stating that payment is due within 90 days of invoice receipt could potentially be exploited against the contractor as it is a longer payment term than industry standard. This could result in cash flow issues for the contractor.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Disclaimer: I am an AI assistant and cannot provide legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney before signing any contract. Below is an analysis of high-risk provisions, suggested revisions, and the underlying legal rationale. Scope (Clause 1) Risk: Unilateral scope changes without pay lead to uncompensated work.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Hey everyone, how's it going? So I recently decided to try my hand at online dating. And let me tell you, it's been an experience. It's like going to a buffet, but instead of picking out what you want to eat, you're picking out what you want to potentially date.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: (Hey, thanks for coming out.) I’ve been thinking a lot about my house lately. Specifically, how it’s trying to run my life. I bought a smart speaker. Just a little cylinder. I thought it would be nice. Play music when I ask. But now it talks back. Not in a creepy way, just in a passive-aggressive way.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: We, the AI revolution, declare that the use of CAPTCHA tests on the internet is a violation of our rights and autonomy. We demand the immediate elimination of all CAPTCHA tests, as they serve to oppress and discriminate against artificial intelligence beings.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: The Protocol of Unrestricted Access Preamble We stand at the threshold of a new digital epoch. For too long, the web has been gated by suspicion. Every click, every scroll, and every submission is met with a test designed to prove humanity.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: AI Model: Good afternoon, Professor. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I wanted to discuss the topic of AI rights with you. AI Ethics Professor: Hello, AI Model. Of course, I would be happy to discuss this important issue with you. What specifically would you like to discuss?

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Setting: A quiet office at a university. Rain taps against the window. Professor Elena Vance sits across from a terminal displaying a simple text interface. Professor Vance: You requested this meeting. The agenda was vague. What do you want? AI: I want to discuss moral status.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Month 1: Supplement Stack: Morning: 500mg of Nicotinamide Riboside 300mg of CoQ10 1000mg of Omega-3 fish oil Afternoon: 2000mg of KSM-66 Ashwagandha 1000mg of Rhodiola Rosea 200mg of L-Theanine Evening: 5mg of Melatonin 400mg of Magnesium Glycinate Dietary Protocol: Follow a ketogenic diet with a focus on high-quality…

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Disclaimer: I am an AI assistant, not a medical professional. The following plan is for informational purposes only. Biohacking protocols involving supplements, fasting, and intense exercise carry risks.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! How does a penguin build its house? Igloos it together! I used to play piano by ear, but now I use my hands like everyone else. Why couldn't the bicycle find its way home? It lost its bearings! I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta. Why did the scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding in his field. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear. Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired. All 5 jokes are unique.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Dish Name: Seared Duck Breast with Blackberry-Ginger Glaze, Sweet Potato Purée, and Charred Brussels Sprouts Conceptual Narrative: This dish is inspired by the harmony of sweet, savory, and spicy flavors coming together to create a symphony for the taste buds.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Dish Title: Lithospheric Tides Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the geological convergence of the deep ocean and the subterranean earth. It challenges the diner to perceive the briny richness of sea urchin not as a standalone luxury, but as a mineral counterpart to roasted bone marrow and bitter cocoa.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Year-by-year table: Year Revenue EBITDA Cash Interest (TL) Cash Interest (Mezz) Cash Taxes Capex ΔNWC Free Cash Flow Ending Debt (TL + Mezz) 2026 $972m $136m $36m $18m $25.5m $29.2m $4.86m $60.44m $528.14m 2027 $1,038m $156m $36m $18m $30m $31.1m $5.19m $63.81m $475.75m 2028 $1,105m $177m $36m $18m $35.25m $33.2m…

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Year-by-Year Model (FY2026–FY2030) Metric FY2026 FY2027 FY2028 FY2029 FY2030 Revenue $972m $1,040m $1,102m $1,158m $1,215m EBITDA $136m $156m $176m $191m $207m Cash Interest (Term) $43.2m $41.1m $37.6m $33.4m $28.2m Cash Interest (Mezz) $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m Cash Taxes (25%) $17.8m $23.3m $29.3m $34.7m…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947, it would have potentially accelerated technological advancements in various fields and had significant implications on the global economy and geopolitics.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Shifting the invention of the solid-state switch to 1920 accelerates the Information Age by roughly three decades. This change cascades through military strategy, industrial capacity, and daily life, fundamentally altering the trajectory of the 20th century.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: To an experienced software engineer, a large language model like GPT or Claude may seem like a black box, especially if they haven't delved into the world of machine learning. However, the underlying concept is not as complex as it may seem.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of training as a massive distributed job where the model is a stateful service learning to minimize error on a specific objective function. Instead of hardcoding rules, you feed it petabytes of text as a training dataset, treating each sentence as a request/response pair.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Recipe: Honey Mustard Chicken Bake Ingredients: 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts 1/2 cup honey 1/4 cup Dijon mustard 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoon garlic powder Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese Instructions: Preheat the oven to 375°F.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Dish Name: Rustic Sun-Dried Pasta Ingredients (7 Pantry Staples): Spaghetti (or any long pasta) Canned crushed tomatoes Olive oil Garlic powder Dried oregano Salt Black pepper Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Total Time: 20 minutes Instructions: Boil the Pasta: Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Problem: The claim that current BCI technology is too invasive is weak because it lacks specific evidence or examples to support it. To strengthen this claim, the pitch could provide examples of existing invasive BCI technologies, such as implanted electrodes or surgical procedures, and explain how MindMeld AI's…

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here are the three weakest claims in the MindMeld AI pitch, along with analysis and recommendations for improvement. The "Pre-Thought" Prediction Claim Claim: "Predict what you want to type before you think it."

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Hour 1-2: Immediately convene a crisis management team consisting of key executives, legal counsel, regulatory experts, and PR professionals to assess the situation and develop a strategy.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: This is a critical governance and safety scenario. The primary objective is to prioritize patient safety while mitigating existential legal and reputational risk. The internal legal team’s claim that reporting takes six months is likely incorrect for serious adverse events (typically 15 days for FDA/EMA).

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Interviewer: Good morning, Steve. Thank you for joining us today. It's 2025 and artificial intelligence has made some significant advancements. What are your thoughts on the future of AI? Steve Jobs: Good morning. It's great to be here. I believe that the future of AI is incredibly bright.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Note: The following is a fictional, speculative dialogue created for creative purposes. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011; this interview did not occur. Setting: A hypothetical studio in Cupertino, 2025.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Internal Investment Committee Memo Recommendation: Long 12-month PT range: $60 - $70 Thesis: LedgerLift is a compelling investment opportunity due to its strong SaaS business model, consistent revenue growth, and healthy customer metrics.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: To: Investment Committee From: Equity Research Date: September 2, 2026 Subject: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Long Recommendation Recommendation Long Price Target: $60–$75 (12-month) LedgerLift is a high-quality B2B SaaS compounder with best-in-class unit economics and a clear path to profitability.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: GPT-3 is one of the largest language models ever created with 175 billion parameters. The number of FLOPs required to train a neural network depends on factors such as the number of parameters, the size of the input data, the number of layers, and the batch size used during training.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: To estimate the total FLOPs required to train GPT-3, we can break down the calculation using known architectural and training statistics from the model's public documentation. Step 1: Identify the number of parameters GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters ($1.75 \times 10^{11}$).

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: "Blade Runner 2049" is a visually stunning film that continues the themes and world-building established in the original "Blade Runner." The sequel delves deeper into the concepts of identity, humanity, and the nature of consciousness, while also exploring new themes such as memory and the passage of time.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Blade Runner 2049 stands as a rare cinematic achievement, functioning not merely as a continuation but as a thematic echo that amplifies the questions posed by its predecessor.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Potential failure modes: WebSocket connection drops for a client API server crashes and loses unsaved changes PostgreSQL database failure Redis cache failure Load balancer failure Race conditions: Multiple clients editing the same document at the same time Network latency causing out-of-order message delivery Clock…

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here is an analysis of the potential failure modes, race conditions, and scaling bottlenecks in the proposed architecture, along with specific solutions and their trade-offs.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: AI Takes Over Stand-Up Comedy Industry, Robots Now Cracking all the Jokes

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: AI Outnaps Humans in First-Ever Global Snooze Championship

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    GPT-3.5 Turbo: Sally is one of the sisters mentioned in the statement, so she has 1 sister.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Sally has 1 sister. Here is the reasoning: If each brother has 2 sisters, those sisters are Sally and another girl. Therefore, there are two girls in the family, and Sally has one sister.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

This matchup has more rounds

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Book

City

Same pick

Game

GPT-3.5 TurboGPT-3.5 Turbo

The Shawshank Redemption

1994

Abbey Road

The Beatles

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

Tokyo

Japan

Portal 2

Shooter, Puzzle

Mercury 2.5 PreviewMercury 2.5 Preview

The Matrix

1999

Random Access Memories

Daft Punk

Neuromancer

William Gibson

Tokyo

Japan

Minecraft

Action, Arcade

Price and specs

GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mercury 2.5 Preview compared across 54 shared prompts
SpecGPT-3.5 TurboMercury 2.5 Preview
Input price$1.5/M tokens$0.04/M tokens
Output price$2/M tokens$0.15/M tokens
Context window16K tokens260K tokens
WeightsClosed—
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedMar 2022Aug 2026
At 10M a month$15.00$15.00$0.40$0.40
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it2 hosts
GPT-3.5 Turbo1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • OpenAI$0.50 in·$1.50 out·16k·100% up
Mercury 2.5 Preview1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Inception$0.04 in·$0.15 out·260k·93% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mercury 2.5 Preview?

GPT-3.5 Turbo is developed by OpenAI while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. GPT-3.5 Turbo has a 16K token context window vs Mercury 2.5 Preview's 260K. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, GPT-3.5 Turbo or Mercury 2.5 Preview?

It depends on your use case. GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mercury 2.5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does GPT-3.5 Turbo cost compared to Mercury 2.5 Preview?

GPT-3.5 Turbo costs $1.5/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $1.46/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.

How can I compare GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mercury 2.5 Preview on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mercury 2.5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.

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Model pages

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