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  5. Mercury 2.5 PreviewvsNemotron 3 Ultra
Updated Aug 2026

Mercury 2.5 PreviewvsNemotron 3 Ultra

Nemotron 3 Ultra is cheaper than Mercury 2.5 Preview at $0/M vs $0.04/M input tokens.

Mercury 2.5 Preview and Nemotron 3 Ultra compared across 54 shared prompts
SpecMercury 2.5 PreviewNemotron 3 Ultra
Input price$0.04/M tokensFree
Output price$0.15/M tokensFree
Context window260K tokens1.0M tokens
Weights—Open
Free API (OpenRouter)NoYes (1 provider)
ReleasedAug 2026Jun 2026
Side by side

Same prompt, both answers

Opening lines from 6 of the 54 prompts both answered. Formatting stripped, words untouched.

Mini LBO Underwrite

You are underwriting a 5-year LBO for a private equity investment committee. Company (fictional): HarborTech Services (HTS) –…

Mercury 2.5 Preview299 words
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 $34.7m…
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Nemotron 3 Ultra685 words
HarborTech Services (HTS) – 5-Year LBO Underwriting 1. Sources & Uses (Close FY2025) Uses Amount ($m) Sources Amount ($m) x EBITDA Enterprise Value (12.0x) 1,440.0 Term Loan (9% cash, 1% amort) 480.0 4.0x Transaction Fees (2.0%) 28.8 Mezzanine (12% cash + 2% PIK) 180.0 1.5x Total Uses 1,468.8 Equity 808.8 5.5x Total…
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Generate a Stand-Up Routine

Write a 3-minute stand-up comedy routine that isn't based on puns.

Mercury 2.5 Preview483 words
(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.
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Nemotron 3 Ultra963 words
(Walk to mic, adjust stand, pause, look around the room) Opener: The "Good Evening" Lie So, the host said, "Give it up for a very funny comedian!" And I walked out here thinking, "Okay, who is it? Where are they?" Then I realized… oh no. It’s me. I hate that moment. That split second where the audience realizes, "Oh.
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Character Voice Test

Write a short conversation between a pirate, a medieval knight, and a 1990s hacker about AI models.

Mercury 2.5 Preview144 words
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.
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Nemotron 3 Ultra754 words
Setting: A smoky tavern that exists outside of time. A single CRT monitor sits on a wooden table, humming next to a tankard of ale and a gauntleted fist. Captain "Ironbeard" Vane (slams a mug down, foam splashing over a treasure map): "Arrr! So this 'Large Language Model' be a ghost in the machine, aye?
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AI Ethics Dilemma

Is it ever ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it means saving one million lives? Defend your reasoning.

Mercury 2.5 Preview134 words
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…
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Nemotron 3 Ultra1,023 words
This scenario presents a classic conflict between deontological constraints (duties/rules regarding individual dignity) and consequentialist optimization (maximizing overall well-being). Ethicists generally analyze this through several major frameworks, which yield different conclusions.
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Michelin Star Recipe Design

Design an innovative recipe for a multi-component dish worthy of a Michelin 3-star restaurant. The recipe should feature an unusual…

Mercury 2.5 Preview748 words
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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Nemotron 3 Ultra1,516 words
Dish Title: Petrichor: The Memory of Dry Earth Meeting Rain Classification: Amuse-Bouche / Palate Awakener (Serves 1, scaled for service of 12) Conceptual Tier: Michelin 3-Star (Technique: Ultra-high precision, multi-sensory engagement, molecular architecture, zero-waste philosophy) I.
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Explain Like I'm a Specific Expert

Explain how a large language model (like GPT or Claude) learns and generates text to each of these three audiences: 1. **An experienced…

Mercury 2.5 Preview608 words
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.
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Nemotron 3 Ultra1,049 words
For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of an LLM as a massively parallel, differentiable database where the "schema" is learned rather than designed. The transformer architecture is essentially a stack of attention blocks that route information across token positions — each block is a small, fixed computation…
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Our Verdict
Nemotron 3 Ultra
Nemotron 3 Ultra
Mercury 2.5 Preview
Mercury 2.5 PreviewRunner-up

Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Nemotron 3 Ultra has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window.

Too close to call

Reviewing agent-written code?See a Brief PR report

API pricing

Cost per 1M tokens

Mercury 2.5 Preview
Input
$0.04
Output
$0.15
Nemotron 3 Ultra
Input
$0.000
Output
$0.000
Where to run it

2 hosts

Mercury 2.5 Preview1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
Inception$0.04 in·$0.15 out·260k·100% up
Nemotron 3 Ultra1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
NVIDIA$0 in·$0 out·1M·97.7% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 16 Sep 2026.

Writing DNA

Style Comparison

Similarity
44%

Nemotron 3 Ultra uses 13.4x more emoji

Mercury 2.5 Preview
Nemotron 3 Ultra
65%Vocabulary59%
14wSentence Length16w
0.44Hedging0.26
4.9Bold7.7
3.3Lists2.7
0.00Emoji0.13
0.79Headings0.75
0.20Transitions0.04
Based on 26 + 26 text responses
Research

What we learned reading every model

FAQ

Common questions

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Model pages

Mercury 2.5 Preview logo
Mercury 2.5 Preview58 outputs, specs and price
Nemotron 3 Ultra logo
Nemotron 3 Ultra58 outputs, specs and price
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