Model comparison

GPT-5.6 Sol vs Mercury

GPT-5.6 Sol is the stronger model overall, scoring 65.0 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 9 shared benchmarks.

GPT-5.6 Sol OpenAI

65.0

Rank #7 Confirmed

Mercury Inception

37.6

Rank #199 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 9 benchmarks with published results for both. GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher in 6 categories and Mercury in 0 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where GPT-5.6 Sol leads 74.8 to 17.5.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is Kagi LLM Benchmark: 67% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 21.6% for Mercury.

Side by side

GPT-5.6 Sol and Mercury specifications
GPT-5.6 SolMercury
ProviderOpenAIInception
Noometry Index65.037.6
Released2026-07-09—
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window1.05M—
Max output128K—
Input $ / M tokens$4—
Output $ / M tokens$20—
Results tracked659

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Category by category

Coding GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 65.1 (#7), Mercury: 38.7 (#170)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
LMArena Coding14981322
DeepSWE72.7%—
FrontierCode47.5%—
CursorBench41.7%—
LMArena WebDev1618—
FrontierSWE32.2%—
SciCode57.1%—
GSO76.5%—
WeirdML89.4%—
MirrorCode20%—
ALE-Bench2,177—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

GPT-5.6 Sol: 50.3 (#7), Mercury: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
APEX-Agents51.4%—
OSWorld 2.027.3%—
τ²-bench Banking46.9%—
PostTrainBench36.2%—
BALROG60%—
GBAEval52.6%—
GDP.pdf30.7%—
LMArena Search1257—
Vending-Bench 29,619—

Reasoning GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 74.8 (#8), Mercury: 17.5 (#293)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
Kagi LLM Benchmark67%21.6%
LMArena Hard Prompts14841285
ARC-AGI-292.5%—
SimpleBench71.7%—
NYT Connections (extended)93.8%—
ARC-AGI-197.5%—
CritPt32.3%—
Chess Puzzles64%—
EnigmaEval37.1%—
EBR-Bench44.8%—
Mystery Game Puzzles58%—
DTBench96%—
LMCA59.2%—
Surface Evolver Bench93.1%—
Bench to the Future 30.14—
Epoch Capabilities Index161.66—

Math Not comparable

GPT-5.6 Sol: 85.6 (#9), Mercury: —

Math benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)89.1%—
FrontierMath Tier 482.9%—
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025100%—
ProofBench83%—
LMArena Math1474—
FrontierMath Erdős0%—

Knowledge Not comparable

GPT-5.6 Sol: 64.3 (#18), Mercury: —

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
GPQA Diamond93.5%—
SimpleQA Verified69.7%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.4%—
LMArena Expert1516—

Multimodal Not comparable

GPT-5.6 Sol: 48.6 (#9), Mercury: —

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
LMArena Vision1281—
Blueprint-Bench 233.6%—
Furniture Assembly56.7%—
LMArena Document1483—

Multilingual GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 55.3 (#32), Mercury: 41.6 (#206)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
LMArena Non-English14521260
LMArena Chinese1527—
LMArena French1477—
LMArena German1476—
LMArena Japanese1471—
LMArena Korean1442—
LMArena Russian1468—
LMArena Spanish1441—

Instruction Following GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 77.7 (#16), Mercury: 65.2 (#224)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
LMArena Instruction Following14821239

Long Context GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 45.4 (#42), Mercury: 38.4 (#198)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
LMArena Longer Query14801266

Writing & Preference GPT-5.6 Sol leads

GPT-5.6 Sol: 73.3 (#12), Mercury: 46.2 (#221)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkGPT-5.6 SolMercury
LMArena Text14571282
LMArena Creative Writing14481191
LMArena Multi-Turn14601282
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1972—
EQ-Bench 41250—

Frequently asked questions

Is GPT-5.6 Sol better than Mercury?

GPT-5.6 Sol is the stronger model overall, scoring 65.0 to 37.6 on the Noometry Index.

Is GPT-5.6 Sol or Mercury better for coding?

GPT-5.6 Sol scores higher on coding benchmarks: 65.1 versus 38.7 in the Noometry coding category.

How many benchmarks do GPT-5.6 Sol and Mercury share?

9 benchmarks have published results for both models. GPT-5.6 Sol has 65 scored results on Noometry and Mercury has 9.

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