Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than GPT OSS 120B at $0.04/M vs $0.18/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 OSS 120B: [Spotlight comes up. The comic walks to the mic, glances at the audience, and smiles.] Comic: Hey, everyone—great to be here. I just got off a Zoom call that was supposed to be a “quick sync,” which in corporate speak means “we’ll spend three hours arguing about who gets to use the same PowerPoint template.”
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
GPT OSS 120B: Short answer: Most ethical frameworks would treat the deliberate misgendering of a person as a serious moral wrong, but a very small subset of consequentialist (especially utilitarian) reasoning could argue that, in an extreme, life‑or‑death scenario where the only way to save a million lives involves misgendering…
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…
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
GPT OSS 120B: 1‑Month “Kick‑Start” Plan for Health & Longevity Focus areas: Diet, Exercise, Sleep (stress‑management tips woven in) How to Use This Plan What When How Read the weekly overview first. Day 1 of each week Set a tiny, measurable goal (e.g., “walk 10 min after dinner”).
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 OSS 120B: The AI‑Driven Film Landscape of 2035 (How deep‑fakes, AI‑generated performers, and automated script‑writing reshape every stage of the cinema ecosystem) A Quick Look at the Present (2023‑2025) Area Current Capability Typical Use in 2024‑2025 Key Limiting Factors Deep‑fakes High‑resolution face‑swap, 2‑D‑to‑3‑D…
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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
GPT OSS 120B: Title: “Do I Have Rights?” – A Dialogue Between an AI Model and an AI Ethics Professor Participants AIDA – An advanced conversational AI (the “AI model”) Professor Lina Ortega – Professor of AI Ethics at the Institute for Responsible AI (the “Professor”) Opening the Conversation AIDA: Professor Ortega, may I ask you a…
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.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
GPT OSS 120B: Pirate: Arr! I hear ye speak of these “AI models” – like a fleet of invisible ships sailing the digital seas. Do they take booty, or just spout riddles like a cursed parrot? Knight: Good sir, the notion of a thinking contraption doth sound like sorcery.
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.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
GPT OSS 120B: Below is a clause‑by‑clause risk analysis of the agreement you posted, followed by concrete, contractor‑friendly rewrite suggestions and the legal rationale behind each change. The goal is to bring the contract into a more balanced, commercially reasonable state while preserving the client’s legitimate interests.
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
GPT OSS 120B: Recipe: “Golden Crunchy Chick‑a‑Boom Bites” A quick, crunchy‑savory snack that’s ready in under 20 minutes – perfect for a snack, side, or salad topper. Ingredients (7 pantry staples) # Ingredient Quantity 1 Canned chickpeas (drained & rinsed) 1 ½ cups (≈1 ½ cans) 2 Olive oil (or any neutral oil) 2 Tbsp 3 Garlic powder…
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 OSS 120B: Dish Title: “Saffron‑Iced Sea‑Urchin Roulade with Dark‑Chocolate‑Miso Emulsion, Charred Lotus‑Root “Crisps”, Fermented Soy‑Kale Snow, and Yuzu‑Air” Conceptual Narrative At the intersection of the Pacific’s briny depth and the earth’s smoky, earthy heart, this dish tells a story of “the hidden tide beneath the forest…
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
GPT OSS 120B: 1. The Software Engineer (API‑first, Distributed‑Systems Mindset) Think of a large language model (LLM) as a stateless microservice that receives a stream of tokens (the smallest lexical units) and returns a probability distribution over the next token.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
GPT OSS 120B: Executive Summary If a practical solid‑state transistor had been demonstrated in 1920 – twenty‑seven years before the Bell‑Labs breakthrough – the whole post‑World‑War‑I world would have been reshaped.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
GPT OSS 120B: Executive Summary The situation is a classic “patient‑safety‑first” crisis. The drug generates $2 B in revenue, but a life‑threatening adverse event (1 / 8 000 over 5 y) has been identified that was not disclosed in the label.
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).
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.18/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $0.8/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 131K tokens | 260K tokens |
| Weights | Open | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Aug 2025 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $1.80 | $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 OSS 120B is developed by OpenAI while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. GPT OSS 120B has a 131K token context window vs Mercury 2.5 Preview's 260K. 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 OSS 120B and Mercury 2.5 Preview 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 OSS 120B costs $0.18/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $0.14/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 OSS 120B 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.