The AI arena is free today

Open Superagent

Mercury 3 vs QvQ-72B-Preview

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 7.4.

Inception · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Mercury 3 leads the overall LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 7.4, 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 QvQ-72B-Preview

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

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Mercury 3
Inception
QvQ-72B-Preview
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
36.1
#98
7.4
#308
Reasoning
34.8
#103
7.8
#300
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 · 4 for QvQ-72B-Preview

No common benchmarks found

Mercury 3 and QvQ-72B-Previewdon'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
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
QvQ-72B-Preview
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Thu Oct 22 2026 • llm-stats.com

Input capabilities

Documented input modalities across available providers

QvQ-72B-Preview supports multimodal inputs, whereas Mercury 3 does not.

QvQ-72B-Preview can handle both text and other forms of data like images, making it suitable for multimodal applications.

Mercury 3

Text
Images
Audio
Video

QvQ-72B-Preview

Text
Images
Audio
Video

License

Usage and distribution terms

Mercury 3 is licensed under a proprietary license, while QvQ-72B-Preview uses Qwen.

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

Mercury 3

Proprietary

Closed source

QvQ-72B-Preview

Qwen

Open weights

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19, while QvQ-72B-Preview was released on 2024-12-25.

Mercury 3 is 22 months newer than QvQ-72B-Preview.

Mercury 3

Oct 19, 2026

0 days ago

1.8yr newer
QvQ-72B-Preview

Dec 25, 2024

1.8 years 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 QvQ-72B-Preview side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Mercury 3
✓ Preferred
QvQ-72B-Preview
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Mercury 3 vs QvQ-72B-Preview.

Which is better, Mercury 3 or QvQ-72B-Preview?

Mercury 3 leads the LLM Stats Score 36.1 to 7.4. Mercury 3 is made by Inception and QvQ-72B-Preview is made by Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Mercury 3 compare to QvQ-72B-Preview in benchmarks?

Mercury 3 scores GPQA: 89.2%, AA-LCR: 77.7%, IFBench: 76.8%, MRCR v2: 75.5%, DeepSearchQA: 71.3%. QvQ-72B-Preview scores MathVista: 71.4%, MMMU: 70.3%, MathVision: 35.9%, OlympiadBench: 20.4%.

What are the context window sizes for Mercury 3 and QvQ-72B-Preview?

Mercury 3 supports 1.0M tokens and QvQ-72B-Preview 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 QvQ-72B-Preview?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (36.1 vs 7.4), multimodal support (no vs yes), licensing (Proprietary vs Qwen). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Mercury 3 and QvQ-72B-Preview?

Mercury 3 is developed by Inception and QvQ-72B-Preview is developed by Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team.

Related comparisons