Mercury 2 vs R1 1776

Inception vs Perplexity — benchmarks, pricing, and capabilities side by side.

•R1 1776 has the higher intelligence index (95.4 vs 77)
•R1 1776 is cheaper ($0.00 vs $0.25 per 1M input)

	Mercury 2	R1 1776
Intelligence index	77	95.4
Developer	Inception	Perplexity
Type	LLM	LLM
Access	API only	—
Context window	128,000 tokens	—
Input price	$0.25 / 1M	$0.00 / 1M
Output price	$0.75 / 1M	$0.00 / 1M
Speed	790 tok/s	—
Released	March 4, 2026	February 18, 2025
Parameters	—	—
Input modalities	Text	—
Output modalities	Text	—

Mercury 2 details R1 1776 details