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Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct vs Mercury 3

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -0.1.

NVIDIA · Inception · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -0.1, ranking #98 overall.

Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.

Choose Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct

  • you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune

Choose Mercury 3

  • overall performance matters — it scores 36.1 and ranks #98 on LLM Stats
  • your work emphasizes reasoning — it leads those capability indexes
  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct
NVIDIA
Mercury 3
Inception
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
-0.1
#350
36.1
#98
Reasoning
-0.4
#343
34.8
#103
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
—
—
Input price
— / M
$0.10 / M
Output price
— / M
$0.35 / M
Context window
—
1,000,000

Individual benchmarks

11 reported for Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct · 12 for Mercury 3

No common benchmarks found

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct and Mercury 3don't have any common benchmark datasets to compare. They may have been evaluated on different testing suites.

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Only Mercury 3 specifies input context (1,000,000 tokens). Only Mercury 3 specifies output context (131,072 tokens).

NVIDIA
Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Inception
Mercury 3
Input1,000,000 tokens
Output131,072 tokens
Thu Oct 22 2026 • llm-stats.com

License

Usage and distribution terms

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct is licensed under Llama 3.1 Community License, while Mercury 3 uses a proprietary license.

License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct

Llama 3.1 Community License

Open weights

Mercury 3

Proprietary

Closed source

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct was released on 2024-10-01, while Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19.

Mercury 3 is 25 months newer than Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct

Oct 1, 2024

2.0 years ago

Mercury 3

Oct 19, 2026

0 days ago

2.0yr newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct has a documented knowledge cutoff of 2023-12-01, while Mercury 3's cutoff date is not specified.

We can confirm Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct's training data extends to 2023-12-01, but cannot make a direct comparison without Mercury 3's cutoff date.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct

Dec 2023

Mercury 3

—

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct and Mercury 3 side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct
✓ Preferred
Mercury 3
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct vs Mercury 3.

Which is better, Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct or Mercury 3?

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -0.1. Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct is made by NVIDIA and Mercury 3 is made by Inception. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct compare to Mercury 3 in benchmarks?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct scores GSM8k: 91.4%, HellaSwag: 85.6%, Winogrande: 84.5%, GSM8K Chat: 81.9%, MMLU Chat: 80.6%. Mercury 3 scores GPQA: 89.2%, AA-LCR: 77.7%, IFBench: 76.8%, MRCR v2: 75.5%, DeepSearchQA: 71.3%.

What are the context window sizes for Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct and Mercury 3?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct supports an unknown number of tokens and Mercury 3 supports 1.0M tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct and Mercury 3?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (-0.1 vs 36.1), licensing (Llama 3.1 Community License vs Proprietary). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct and Mercury 3?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct is developed by NVIDIA and Mercury 3 is developed by Inception.

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