GLM-5.2 (Max) vs Mercury 2

Which is better for the money: GLM-5.2 (Max) by Z AI or Mercury 2 by Inception? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

Z AIGLM-5.2 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 33.70
Total cost: $2097

InceptionMercury 2Off the frontier

Intelligence: 10.80
Total cost: $105

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GLM-5.2 (Max) scores 22.9 points higher (33.7 vs 10.8) but costs 20× as much to run the benchmark ($2097 vs $105; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GLM-5.2 (Max) when you need intelligence above 10.8, and Mercury 2 when 10.8 is enough.

Metric	GLM-5.2 (Max)	Mercury 2	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	33.7	10.8	−68.0% Mercury 2 is 68.0% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,097.29	$104.94	−95.0% Mercury 2 is 95.0% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	29.25s	6.65s	−77.3% Mercury 2 is 77.3% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$1.40 / $4.40	$0.25 / $0.75
Input modalities	Text	Text

Mercury 2 vs GLM-5.2 (Max): 68.0% less intelligence, 95.0% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 77.3% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GLM-5.2 (Max): what beats it Mercury 2: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GLM-5.2 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
Mercury 2 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) scores 37.80 for $94.1.

GLM-5.2 (Max)Mercury 2Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-2/mercury-2 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/glm-5-2/mercury-2?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill