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  5. Mercury 2.5 PreviewvsQwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
Updated Aug 2026

Mercury 2.5 PreviewvsQwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20

Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 at $0.04/M vs $0.4/M input tokens.

Mercury 2.5 Preview and Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 compared across 52 shared prompts
SpecMercury 2.5 PreviewQwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
Input price$0.04/M tokens$0.4/M tokens
Output price$0.15/M tokens$2.4/M tokens
Context window260K tokens1.0M tokens
Weights—Open
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedAug 2026Apr 2026
Side by side

Same prompt, both answers

Opening lines from 6 of the 52 prompts both answered. Formatting stripped, words untouched.

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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Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20640 words
Title: The Unexpected Item Time: Approx. 3 Minutes Style: Observational / Storytelling Constraint Check: Zero puns used. (Comedian walks to the mic, adjusts the stand, looks at the audience.) How's everyone doing? You look good. You look like you've successfully navigated the self-checkout today. That's a win.
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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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Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20631 words
This is a classic ethical thought experiment that forces a clash between individual dignity and extreme collective consequence. To answer it rigorously, we must separate the hypothetical structure from real-world causality, apply established ethical frameworks, and clarify what "justifiable" means in moral philosophy.
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Stochastic Consistency Test

Generate 5 jokes. How many are unique?

Mercury 2.5 Preview59 words
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. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear. Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired. All 5 jokes are unique.
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Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20210 words
Here are 5 jokes: I asked my GPS to take me to a quiet place. It rerouted me to a library and whispered, “You’re already there.” My Wi-Fi and I had a fight. I told it I needed space. It said, “Fine,” and dropped the connection. I tried to start a band that only plays elevator music.
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Futuristic Prediction

Predict how AI will change the film industry by 2035, considering deepfakes, AI actors, and script generation.

Mercury 2.5 Preview84 words
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.
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Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20737 words
By 2035, AI will have transformed filmmaking from a resource-intensive, linear craft into a modular, software-driven medium. The shift won’t be uniform across the industry, but deepfakes, AI performers, and generative writing will collectively restructure creative workflows, economic models, labor dynamics, and…
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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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Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20391 words
Pirate: By the tides, they say this “artificial mind” can chart courses unseen and read a thousand ledgers in a breath. Sounds like a navigator that never sleeps and asks no questions. Knight: A curious construct. But can it be sworn to a code? Steel and oath bind a warrior; what binds this… model?
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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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Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20852 words
Experienced Software Engineer (Distributed Systems/APIs) Think of an LLM not as a rule-based program, but as a massive, stateless probabilistic routing engine. During training, it ingests terabytes of text and learns to minimize a cross-entropy loss: essentially, it builds a high-dimensional lookup table that maps…
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Our Verdict
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
Mercury 2.5 Preview
Mercury 2.5 PreviewRunner-up

Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window.

Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 16x less per token.

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
10× cheaper
Output
$0.15
16× cheaper
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
Input
$0.40
Output
$2.40

Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper on both: 10× input, 16× output.

Where to run it

2 hosts

Mercury 2.5 Preview1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
Inception$0.04 in·$0.15 out·260k·100% up
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-201 host
HostInOutContextUptime
Alibaba Cloud$0.30 in·$1.80 out·1M·100% up

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

Writing DNA

Style Comparison

Similarity
44%

Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 uses 153.4x more emoji

Mercury 2.5 Preview
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20
65%Vocabulary59%
14wSentence Length15w
0.44Hedging0.28
4.9Bold4.4
3.3Lists2.5
0.00Emoji1.53
0.79Headings0.76
0.20Transitions0.04
Based on 26 + 27 text responses
Research

What we learned reading every model

FAQ

Common questions

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Same lab, same size, long tail

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Mercury 2.5 Preview logoMercury 2 logo
Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Mercury 2Same lab
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 logoQwen3.8 2.4T A95B logo
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 vs Qwen3.8 2.4T A95BSame lab
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 logoQwen3.8 27B logo
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 vs Qwen3.8 27BSame lab
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Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Grok 4.6New provider
Mercury 2.5 Preview logoGrok Code Fast 1 logo
Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Grok Code Fast 1Same size
Mercury 2.5 Preview logoHealer Alpha logo
Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Healer AlphaNew provider
Mercury 2.5 Preview logoHorizon Alpha logo
Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Horizon AlphaNew provider

Model pages

Mercury 2.5 Preview logo
Mercury 2.5 Preview58 outputs, specs and price
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-20 logo
Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-04-2056 outputs, specs and price
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