Mercury 2 Named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2026

Today, TIME named Mercury 2 to its Best Inventions of 2026 list in the Artificial Intelligence category. Mercury 2 is the first diffusion LLM built to reason, and we're proud to see our new approach to language model architecture recognized alongside this year's other honorees. See the full list.

Thank you to our customers, our investors, and the team that spent years betting that language models don't have to write one word at a time.

A new foundation

AI now runs inside coding assistants, voice agents, search systems, copilots, and agentic workflows that take repeated actions inside larger loops. Each step adds delay, and reasoning adds more.

The cause is architectural. Nearly every LLM in production today is autoregressive. It generates text one token at a time, so the more a model thinks, the longer users wait and the more each completed task costs. The industry has spent billions working around that limit with specialized chips, optimized serving stacks, and model compression. These workarounds help, but they leave the underlying architecture in place.

Diffusion, applied to language

Mercury 2 is built on diffusion, the approach behind modern image and video generation, now applied to language. Instead of committing one token at a time like a typewriter, it works like an editor: it generates many tokens in parallel and refines them over several passes.

Mercury 2 generates over 1,000 tokens per second, more than 5x faster than leading speed-optimized LLMs. 

Speed is only part of the story. As AI infrastructure costs climb and data centers strain to keep up with demand, every token carries a cost in compute, electricity, and cooling water. Autoregressive generation leaves GPUs waiting on memory much of the time. Mercury 2 gives them the dense parallel work they were designed for, producing more output per GPU cycle and per unit of energy on widely available NVIDIA GPUs.

What's come since: Mercury 2.5, Mercury Voice, Mercury Router

Mercury 2 launched in February. In September, we followed it with Mercury 2.5, our most capable production model yet. It is a significant step up in quality over Mercury 2, with the same low-latency, low-cost serving profile. Mercury Voice is our dLLM optimized for voice agents, delivering time-to-first-token under 170ms, and Mercury Router understands user prompts and routes tasks to the best models according to quality, speed, and cost.

Coming soon, we'll be releasing our most capable model to date. If you're interested, please reach out for early access.