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Mercury 3 vs North Micro Vision Instruct

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -5.6.

Inception · Cohere · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -5.6, ranking #98 overall.

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

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

Choose North Micro Vision Instruct

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

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Mercury 3
Inception
North Micro Vision Instruct
Cohere
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
36.1
#98
-5.6
#381
Reasoning
34.8
#103
-8.2
#381
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
—
—
Input price
$0.10 / M
— / M
Output price
$0.35 / M
— / M
Context window
1,000,000
—

Individual benchmarks

12 reported for Mercury 3 · 19 for North Micro Vision Instruct

No common benchmarks found

Mercury 3 and North Micro Vision Instructdon'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).

Inception
Mercury 3
Input1,000,000 tokens
Output131,072 tokens
Cohere
North Micro Vision Instruct
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Fri Oct 23 2026 • llm-stats.com

Input capabilities

Documented input modalities across available providers

North Micro Vision Instruct supports multimodal inputs, whereas Mercury 3 does not.

North Micro Vision Instruct can handle both text and other forms of data like images, making it suitable for multimodal applications.

Mercury 3

Text
Images
Audio
Video

North Micro Vision Instruct

Text
Images
Audio
Video

License

Usage and distribution terms

Mercury 3 is licensed under a proprietary license, while North Micro Vision Instruct uses Apache 2.0.

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

Mercury 3

Proprietary

Closed source

North Micro Vision Instruct

Apache 2.0

Open weights

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19, while North Micro Vision Instruct was released on 2026-08-12.

Mercury 3 is 2 months newer than North Micro Vision Instruct.

Mercury 3

Oct 19, 2026

3 days ago

2mo newer
North Micro Vision Instruct

Aug 12, 2026

2 months ago

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.

Unable to compare the recency of their training data.

No cutoff dates available

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Mercury 3 and North Micro Vision Instruct side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Mercury 3
✓ Preferred
North Micro Vision Instruct
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Mercury 3 vs North Micro Vision Instruct.

Which is better, Mercury 3 or North Micro Vision Instruct?

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to -5.6. Mercury 3 is made by Inception and North Micro Vision Instruct is made by Cohere. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Mercury 3 compare to North Micro Vision Instruct in benchmarks?

Mercury 3 scores GPQA: 89.2%, AA-LCR: 77.7%, IFBench: 76.8%, MRCR v2: 75.5%, DeepSearchQA: 71.3%. North Micro Vision Instruct scores DocVQA: 92.1%, ChartQA: 80.8%, OCRBench: 79.2%, AI2D: 77.5%, IFEval: 74.9%.

What are the context window sizes for Mercury 3 and North Micro Vision Instruct?

Mercury 3 supports 1.0M tokens and North Micro Vision Instruct supports an unknown number of tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between Mercury 3 and North Micro Vision Instruct?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (36.1 vs -5.6), multimodal support (no vs yes), licensing (Proprietary vs Apache 2.0). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Mercury 3 and North Micro Vision Instruct?

Mercury 3 is developed by Inception and North Micro Vision Instruct is developed by Cohere.

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