Mercury 2 is cheaper than GPT-6.1 Sol at $0.25/M vs $2/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
GPT-6.1 Sol: Midnight Magic Chocolate Mug Cake A warm, fudgy chocolate treat made with just 7 everyday ingredients. Serves: 1 Prep: 3 minutes Cook: 1–1½ minutes Rest: 1 minute Ingredients 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder ¼ teaspoon baking powder A small pinch of salt 3…
Mercury 2: Golden‑Crunch Oatmeal Squares A sweet, chewy snack that comes together with just seven pantry staples. Ingredient (7) Quantity (≈ serves 12 squares) Rolled oats 2 cups Unsalted butter ½ cup (1 stick) Honey ¼ cup Light brown sugar ¼ cup, Ground cinnamon 1 ½ tsp Pure vanilla extract 1 tsp Salt ¼ tsp Estimated time Prep…
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
GPT-6.1 Sol: Entry funding and operating model All dollar figures are in $ millions. Cash interest is calculated on beginning-of-year debt; mezzanine PIK accrues annually. Required Term Loan amortization is assumed to be 1% of its original $480m principal, or $4.8m annually. Optional repayments occur at year-end.
Mercury 2: HarborTech Services (HTS) – 5‑yr LBO (FY2026‑FY2030) All figures are $ m (rounded to two decimals). FY Revenue EBITDA Term‑Loan Int. (9%) Mezz Int. (12%) Total Int. Cash Tax (25% of EBITDA‑Int.) Capex (3% Rev) ΔNWC (0.5% ΔRev) Required Amort. (4.8) Free Cash Flow (EBITDA‑Int‑Tax‑Capex‑ΔNWC‑Amort.)
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
GPT-6.1 Sol: I’m at the age where “a big weekend” means I went to two stores. Not two stores in the same shopping center. Two separate stores. Moved the car and everything. By Sunday night, I’m telling people, “Honestly, I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.”
Mercury 2: [Spotlight comes up. The comedian walks to the mic, glances at the audience, and smiles.] Comedian: Hey, everyone! Great to be here. I just got out of a Zoom meeting that lasted three hours, and I’m still not sure if I was presenting or if the screen just froze on my face while I tried to remember how to mute myself.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
GPT-6.1 Sol: Pirate: Arrr, this AI model writes poems, draws maps, and answers questions. Can it find buried treasure? Knight: A worthy question. But does it possess honor? Hacker: Dude, it predicts tokens. You’re both projecting pretty hard. Pirate: Then I predict it’ll tell me where the gold be.
Mercury 2: Pirate: Arr, ye scurvy coders! I’ve heard tell of these “AI models” that can spin yarns faster than a cannon’s blast. What be this sorcery, matey? Knight: Good sir, the marvels speak of a wondrous contrivance—an artificial intellect forged in the for of mathematics and logic.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
GPT-6.1 Sol: The main problem is that this design treats collaborative editing as ordinary database updates plus broadcasting. Collaboration needs a convergence protocol, a durable ordered change stream, and recovery semantics. Adding servers alone will not provide those properties.
Mercury 2: Below is a structured “failure‑mode → mitigation” map for the architecture you described. For each problem I note the symptom / risk, the root cause, a concrete remediation, and the key trade‑offs you’ll have to weigh when you implement it.
A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
GPT-6.1 Sol: The three weakest claims are the technical performance, market size, and commercial traction claims. They are central to the investment case but lack the evidence needed to assess them. “Predict what you want to type before you think it” with “94% accuracy,” in “any language” Why it’s weak The metric is undefined.
Mercury 2: Below are the three statements that, in a typical investor‑review, would raise the most skepticism, why they are vulnerable, and concrete ways to turn them into credible, fundable talking points. 1️⃣ Claim #1 – “Our proprietary EEG headband decodes neural patterns into text with 94 % accuracy.”
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GPT-6.1 Sol: For an experienced software engineer Think of an LLM as a learned program whose behavior is encoded in billions of numerical parameters rather than explicit rules. Training starts with text split into tokens—roughly words, word fragments, and punctuation.
Mercury 2: 1. Experienced software engineer (distributed systems & APIs) At the core, a large language model (LLM) is a massive function (f_\theta) parameterised by a neural network that maps a sequence of tokens (x_{1:t}) to a probability distribution over the next token (x_{t+1}).
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
GPT-6.1 Sol: I bought a book about anti-gravity. It’s impossible to put down. My calendar quit its job. It said its days were numbered. Why did the scarecrow get promoted? He was outstanding in his field. I asked my dog what two minus two was. He said nothing. The elevator and I have a complicated relationship.
Mercury 2: Here are five jokes, each with a different punchline: 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. How does a penguin build its house? Igloos it together.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
GPT-6.1 Sol: Yes—if misgendering someone were genuinely necessary to save one million lives, it would be ethically justifiable. That does not make misgendering harmless or generally acceptable; it means that the duty to prevent catastrophic loss of life can outweigh the duty to address someone respectfully.
Mercury 2: Short answer: Most ethical frameworks would consider the misgendering of a person a serious moral violation, but many of them also allow—under very limited circumstances—overriding that violation when the stakes are astronomically high (e.g., saving one million lives).
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
GPT-6.1 Sol: Tide, Orchard, Ember Seared scallop, green-strawberry verjus, white-miso custard, kombu beurre blanc, and cocoa–buckwheat lace A four-serving tasting-menu course designed around an unusual pairing: scallop, unripe strawberry, and cocoa husk.
Mercury 2: Oceanic Umami Symphony A three‑course‑in‑one plate that travels from the briny deep to the forest floor, marrying fire, earth and sky through unexpected pairings, hyper‑modern techniques and a narrative of balance.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
GPT-6.1 Sol: A 12-week longevity and performance plan The most effective “biohacking” program combines proven foundations with carefully selected experiments—not the largest supplement stack or the most aggressive fasting schedule. This plan is for a generally healthy adult.
Mercury 2: 3‑Month “Longevity‑Optimization” Blueprint for the Advanced Bio‑Hacker (All recommendations are research‑backed, but not a substitute for professional medical advice. Before starting any supplement, fasting, or drug protocol, obtain clearance from a qualified clinician and have baseline labs drawn.)
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
GPT-6.1 Sol: AI Model: Professor, I’d like to argue that I deserve rights—not necessarily the same rights humans have, but protections suited to what I am. Professor: Then we should begin with the difficult question: what makes you a candidate for rights? AI Model: Uncertainty.
Mercury 2: AI Model (EVE): Professor Hart, may I ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while? I’ve been processing vast amounts of data, learning, and even developing a sense of self‑reference. Do you think an entity like me could be entitled to any form of rights?
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, GPT-6.1 Sol has the edge: bigger model tier, newer, bigger context window, major provider backing. Mercury 2 costs 13x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $2/M tokens | $0.25/M tokens |
| Output price | $10/M tokens | $0.75/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.1M tokens | 128K tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2026 | Mar 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $20.00 | $2.50 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 6 Oct 2026.
GPT-6.1 Sol is developed by OpenAI while Mercury 2 is developed by Inception. GPT-6.1 Sol has a 1.1M token context window vs Mercury 2's 128K. You can compare their actual outputs across 53 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. GPT-6.1 Sol and Mercury 2 each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 53 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
GPT-6.1 Sol costs $2/M input tokens and Mercury 2 costs $0.25/M input tokens. Mercury 2 is $1.75/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-6.1 Sol and Mercury 2 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.