Token Efficiency Frontier and Diffusion LLMs

As frontier models permeate organizations, the economics of these models beg the question: should enterprises pay for the smartest model for every workflow? In practice, AI-native enterprises make thousands of invisible calls to frontier models per session, the ones that route, compress, search, and summarize, and running a frontier model for all of them means paying frontier prices for work that doesn't need frontier intelligence. In this talk, I will show how diffusion LLMs change the token economics. At Inception, we have released Mercury, the world's first generation of frontier LLMs built using diffusion. Our latest model, Mercury 2, generates tokens in parallel to run 5x faster than comparable speed-optimized models from the top frontier labs at a fraction of the cost, at comparable quality. Available on all major platforms, Mercury 2 powers workflows at top enterprises spanning coding, search, and voice, delivering ultra-fast user experiences at a fraction of the cost of competing language models.