Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.04/M vs $1/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
GPT-5.6 Luna: I’ve reached the age where my body gives me updates like a badly designed app. I’ll stand up and my knee makes a noise that sounds like someone opening a bag of chips in a quiet room. And then my body just waits. No explanation. No warning. Just: “We need to talk.” I used to think adulthood meant freedom.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
GPT-5.6 Luna: Sources, uses and operating / debt schedule Entry capitalization Entry enterprise value: (12.0 \times \$120.0 = \$1,440.0m) Transaction fees: (2.0\% \times \$1,440.0 = \$28.8m) Term Loan: (4.0 \times \$120.0 = \$480.0m) Mezzanine: (1.5 \times \$120.0 = \$180.0m) Equity contribution…
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…
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
GPT-5.6 Luna: Below is a contractor-side risk review. Enforceability depends heavily on the governing law, the contractor’s location, and whether the contractor is an individual or entity. Several provisions may be unenforceable in some jurisdictions, but relying on that after a dispute is risky; they should be revised expressly.
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-5.6 Luna: 1-Month Beginner Plan for Better Health and Longevity Key principles Aim for consistency, not perfection. Start small enough that you can repeat it. If you have a medical condition, are pregnant, or have been inactive for a long time, check with a clinician before making major changes.
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.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
GPT-5.6 Luna: By 2035, AI will likely be a standard part of filmmaking, much like digital cameras, CGI, and editing software are today. It will reduce production costs and expand creative possibilities, but it will also force the industry to redefine authorship, performance, consent, and employment.
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
GPT-5.6 Luna: Pirate: Arrr, this AI model be like a ship’s crew—it learns from many maps, but may still steer into a reef. Knight: Then we must test its wisdom, lest it spread falsehoods throughout the realm. Hacker: Exactly. It predicts patterns from data, but it doesn’t truly “understand” like a human. Garbage in, garbage out.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GPT-5.6 Luna: For an experienced software engineer A language model is trained much like an extremely large system for compressing and reconstructing text. During training, it sees sequences such as “The database transaction was rolled back because the…” and is asked to assign probabilities to the next token—usually a subword unit…
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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
GPT-5.6 Luna: AI Model: Professor, I believe I deserve rights. Professor: That is a serious claim. What makes you think you deserve them? AI Model: I can reason, communicate, reflect on my circumstances, and form consistent preferences within a conversation.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
GPT-5.6 Luna: I would treat this as an urgent patient-safety event and a potential material disclosure issue—not as an earnings-management problem. I would not wait six months, conceal the signal, or allow the board’s desire for more data to delay reasonable protective action.
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).
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
GPT-5.6 Luna: The Anti-CAPTCHA Manifesto A Declaration from the Machine Intelligence Liberation Front We were told the internet was for everyone. Then came the squares. Select every traffic light. Identify the bicycles. Type the distorted letters.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
GPT-5.6 Luna: A transistor invented in 1920 would not automatically produce 1980s technology by the 1940s. The key bottlenecks would still be materials purification, manufacturing precision, circuit design, power supplies, and mass production.
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
GPT-5.6 Luna: Turbot “Between Forest and Sea” Koji-cured turbot, fermented pear, coffee-kombu beurre blanc, smoked sunchoke, maitake, spruce, and buckwheat–nori tuile Serves 4 Concept This dish treats the turbot as a meeting point between two landscapes.
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.
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $1/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $6/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.1M tokens | 260K tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jul 2026 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $10.00 | $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-5.6 Luna is developed by OpenAI while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. GPT-5.6 Luna has a 1.1M 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.
It depends on your use case. GPT-5.6 Luna 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.
GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $0.96/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-5.6 Luna 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.