Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than GPT-5.4 Pro at $0.04/M vs $30/M input tokens.
Playable Mario level in one HTML file. The physics is the hard part.
Which answer wins?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
GPT-5.4 Pro: Below is a simplified LBO build for HarborTech Services (HTS). All figures in $m unless noted. Rounding: tables are rounded; IRR/MOIC use unrounded math. Entry / Sources & Uses FY2025 EBITDA: 120.0 Purchase price: 12.0x EBITDA → Enterprise value = 12.0 × 120.0 = 1,440.0 Transaction fees: 2.0% of EV → 28.8 Total uses =…
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…
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
GPT-5.4 Pro: Most likely, a transistor invented in 1920 would move the electronics/computing frontier forward by about 10–15 years by 1980, not the full 27 years. Reason: the transistor alone is not enough; you also need high-purity materials, crystal growth, photolithography, test equipment, software, batteries, precision…
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.
Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.
GPT-5.4 Pro: LedgerLift (LLLT) — IC Memo Recommendation: Pass 12-month PT range: $40–$47 2-sentence thesis: LedgerLift looks like a good business but only an average stock here: retention is strong (94% GRR, 123% NRR), the model is mostly subscription, and margins are inflecting, but at $46 the shares already discount a lot of the…
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.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
GPT-5.4 Pro: This agreement is heavily client-favored. Every numbered clause has language that could be used against the contractor. Short version: I would not sign it without major redlines to Clauses 1–9, especially 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Below is a clause-by-clause review.
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.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
GPT-5.4 Pro: Here’s a simple, beginner-friendly 1-month health and longevity plan built around 3 key areas: Nutrition Movement Recovery (sleep + stress) The goal is consistency, not perfection. Start small and make the habits easy enough to keep.
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
GPT-5.4 Pro: Dragon Pantry Peanut Noodles A fast, sweet-savory noodle dish made from 7 pantry staples. Ingredients 8 oz spaghetti 1/3 cup peanut butter 3 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp honey 1 tbsp vegetable oil 1 tsp garlic powder 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes Water for boiling/thinning the sauce doesn’t count.
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
GPT-5.4 Pro: Below is a dish designed in the language of a contemporary 3-star tasting menu: precise, seasonal, technically layered, and centered on a pairing that feels surprising at first, then inevitable.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
GPT-5.4 Pro: I do not wait. A credible, previously unlabeled risk of liver failure in a chronic-pain drug is a patient-safety crisis, a regulatory crisis, and a securities-disclosure issue at the same time.
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).
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
GPT-5.4 Pro: Below is a 12-week, high-performance longevity protocol designed for a healthy biohacker who wants to improve lifespan-relevant markers, physical performance, and cognitive output at the same time. Use it as a data-driven template, not dogma.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GPT-5.4 Pro: For an experienced software engineer Think of an LLM less like a database of facts and more like a gigantic learned program that has been trained to compress the patterns of text, code, and conversations into its weights.
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.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
GPT-5.4 Pro: This architecture will work for a demo, but it has major correctness, latency, and security problems for a Google-Docs-like editor. Highest-risk flaws Client-clock last-write-wins will lose edits and can be gamed by bad clocks.
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.
A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
GPT-5.4 Pro: The 3 weakest claims are the ones that are both most extraordinary and least well-supported. Weak claim Why it’s weak How to strengthen it 1) “MindMeld AI reads your brainwaves to predict what you want to type before you think it.” This is the biggest credibility risk in the deck.
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."
Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, GPT-5.4 Pro has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window, major provider backing. Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 1200x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $30/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $180/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.1M tokens | 260K tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Mar 2026 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $300 | $0.40 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.
GPT-5.4 Pro is developed by OpenAI while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. GPT-5.4 Pro has a 1.1M token context window vs Mercury 2.5 Preview's 260K. You can compare their actual outputs across 18 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. GPT-5.4 Pro and Mercury 2.5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 18 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
GPT-5.4 Pro costs $30/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $29.96/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of GPT-5.4 Pro 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.