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Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 vs Mercury 2

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2 are closely matched at 19.1 and 23.5 on the LLM Stats Score.

NVIDIA · Inception · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2 are closely matched on the overall LLM Stats Score at 19.1 and 23.5.

In the 3 individual benchmarks reported for both models, Mercury 2 wins 2; this is a narrower head-to-head signal than the composite indexes.

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

Choose Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1

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

Choose Mercury 2

  • you value its reported benchmark strengths — it wins 2 of 3 exact shared results
  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Feb 2026

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1
NVIDIA
Mercury 2
Inception
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
19.1
#222
23.5
#190
Reasoning
18.8
#221
22.6
#184
Coding
12.3
#158
12.2
#162
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
1 of 3
2 of 3
Input price
— / M
$0.25 / M
Output price
— / M
$0.75 / M
Context window
—
128,000

Capability indexes

Additional strengths measured across groups of related public benchmarks

1 shared
Index
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1
Mercury 2
Math
15.6#221
23.4#136
Conservative TrueSkill rating · higher is betterHow scores work

Individual benchmarks

6 reported for Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 · 6 for Mercury 2

3 shared

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 outperforms in 1 benchmarks (GPQA), while Mercury 2 is better at 2 benchmarks (AIME 2025, LiveCodeBench).

Mercury 2 shows notably better performance in the majority of benchmarks.

Sun Oct 11 2026 • llm-stats.com

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Only Mercury 2 specifies input context (128,000 tokens). Only Mercury 2 specifies output context (8,192 tokens).

NVIDIA
Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Inception
Mercury 2
Input128,000 tokens
Output8,192 tokens
Sun Oct 11 2026 • llm-stats.com

License

Usage and distribution terms

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 is licensed under Llama 3.1 Community License, while Mercury 2 uses a proprietary license.

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

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1

Llama 3.1 Community License

Open weights

Mercury 2

Proprietary

Closed source

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 was released on 2025-04-07, while Mercury 2 was released on 2026-02-24.

Mercury 2 is 11 months newer than Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1

Apr 7, 2025

1.5 years ago

Mercury 2

Feb 24, 2026

7 months ago

10mo newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 has a documented knowledge cutoff of 2023-12-01, while Mercury 2's cutoff date is not specified.

We can confirm Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1's training data extends to 2023-12-01, but cannot make a direct comparison without Mercury 2's cutoff date.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1

Dec 2023

Mercury 2

—

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2 side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1
✓ Preferred
Mercury 2
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 vs Mercury 2.

Which is better, Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 or Mercury 2?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2 are closely matched on the LLM Stats Score at 19.1 and 23.5. Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 is made by NVIDIA and Mercury 2 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 Ultra 253B v1 compare to Mercury 2 in benchmarks?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 scores MATH-500: 97.0%, IFEval: 89.5%, GPQA: 76.0%, BFCL v2: 74.1%, AIME 2025: 72.5%. Mercury 2 scores AIME 2025: 91.1%, GPQA: 74.0%, IFBench: 71.0%, LiveCodeBench: 67.0%, Tau2 Airline: 53.0%.

What are the context window sizes for Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 supports an unknown number of tokens and Mercury 2 supports 128K 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 Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (19.1 vs 23.5), licensing (Llama 3.1 Community License vs Proprietary). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 and Mercury 2?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron Ultra 253B v1 is developed by NVIDIA and Mercury 2 is developed by Inception.

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