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Mercury 3 vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base

Comparing Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base across benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities.

Inception · Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base trade strengths across price, capabilities, and technical limits. The better choice depends on the workload.

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

Choose Mercury 3

  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Oct 2026

Choose Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base

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

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Mercury 3
Inception
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base
Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team
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 · 0 for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base

No common benchmarks found

Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Basedon'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
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Fri Oct 23 2026 • llm-stats.com

License

Usage and distribution terms

Mercury 3 is licensed under a proprietary license, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base 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

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base

Apache 2.0

Open weights

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Mercury 3 was released on 2026-10-19, while Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base was released on 2025-09-10.

Mercury 3 is 13 months newer than Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base.

Mercury 3

Oct 19, 2026

1 days ago

1.1yr newer
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base

Sep 10, 2025

1.1 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 Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Mercury 3
✓ Preferred
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Mercury 3 vs Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base.

Which is better, Mercury 3 or Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base?

Mercury 3 (Inception) and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base (Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team) each have strengths in different areas. Compare their benchmark scores, pricing, context windows, and capabilities above to determine which fits your needs.

How does Mercury 3 compare to Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base in benchmarks?

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 Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base?

Mercury 3 supports 1.0M tokens and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base 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 Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base?

Key differences include licensing (Proprietary vs Apache 2.0). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Mercury 3 and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base?

Mercury 3 is developed by Inception and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Base is developed by Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Team.

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