Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Mercury 2 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 56. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Mercury 2's sharpest advantage is in mathematics, where it averages 80.9 against 67.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MuSR, 82 to 59. Seed 1.6 Flash does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Mercury 2 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $0.25 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.08 input / $0.30 output per 1M tokens for Seed 1.6 Flash. That is roughly 2.5x on output cost alone. Seed 1.6 Flash gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 128K for Mercury 2.
Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Seed 1.6 Flash only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Mercury 2
63.7
Seed 1.6 Flash
54.5
Mercury 2
41.1
Seed 1.6 Flash
27.6
Mercury 2
68.3
Seed 1.6 Flash
73.1
Mercury 2
80.1
Seed 1.6 Flash
66.8
Mercury 2
57.2
Seed 1.6 Flash
47.3
Mercury 2
84
Seed 1.6 Flash
81
Mercury 2
79.7
Seed 1.6 Flash
72.8
Mercury 2
80.9
Seed 1.6 Flash
67.1
Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 56. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MuSR, where the scores are 82 and 59.
Mercury 2 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57.2 versus 47.3. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.1 versus 27.6. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 67.1. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 66.8. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 63.7 versus 54.5. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Seed 1.6 Flash has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.1 versus 68.3. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 84 versus 81. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 72.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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