MAI-Thinking-1 vs Mercury 3
MAI-Thinking-1 and Mercury 3 are closely matched at 32.6 and 36.1 on the LLM Stats Score.
Microsoft · Inception · Updated for 2026
Which is better?
MAI-Thinking-1 and Mercury 3 are closely matched on the overall LLM Stats Score at 32.6 and 36.1.
In the 3 individual benchmarks reported for both models, Mercury 3 wins 3; 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 MAI-Thinking-1
- you are already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem
Choose Mercury 3
- you value its reported benchmark strengths — it wins 3 of 3 exact shared results
- you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026
At a glance
The differences that matter most.
Capability indexes
Additional strengths measured across groups of related public benchmarks
Individual benchmarks
23 reported for MAI-Thinking-1 · 12 for Mercury 3
MAI-Thinking-1 outperforms in 0 benchmarks, while Mercury 3 is better at 3 benchmarks (GPQA, IFBench, Multi-Challenge).
Mercury 3 significantly outperforms across most benchmarks.
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).
License
Usage and distribution terms
Both models are licensed under proprietary licenses.
Both models have usage restrictions defined by their respective organizations.
Proprietary
Closed source
Proprietary
Closed source
Release Timeline
When each model was launched
MAI-Thinking-1 was released on 2026-06-02, while Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19.
Mercury 3 is 5 months newer than MAI-Thinking-1.
Jun 2, 2026
4 months ago
Oct 19, 2026
1 days ago
4mo newerKnowledge Cutoff
When training data ends
Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.
Unable to compare the recency of their training data.
Outputs Comparison
Judge for yourself.
Run your own prompts against MAI-Thinking-1 and Mercury 3 side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.
FAQ
Common questions about MAI-Thinking-1 vs Mercury 3.