Choose AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 if…
No advantage on the data we track — pick it for provider preference or output quality on your own prompts.
AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 vs Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview
Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview comes out ahead on the data we track: 4 advantages and none for AI21: Jamba Large 1.7.
Key numbers
| Spec | AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | AI21 | Inception |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $2.00 | $0.04 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $8.00 | $0.15 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $3.50 | $0.07 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 18% | 85% |
| Context window | 256K tokens (~384 pages) | 260K tokens (~390 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 45% | 47% |
| Max output per response | 4K tokens (~3,100 words) | 66K tokens (~49,200 words) |
| Input types | text | text |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2025-08-08 | 2026-08-31 |
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What it costs for real workloads
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $310 | $6.00 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $304 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $320 | $6.30 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $314 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $336 | $6.60 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $329 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $208 | $4.10 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $204 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $108 | $2.15 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $106 |
Capabilities side by side
| Capability | AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | — | ✓ Yes | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | — | — | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | — | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | — | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | — | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
- AI21: Jamba Large 1.7: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-03-10.
- Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-02.
Which should you choose?
Choose Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview if…
- cost matters at scale — it is 98% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($6.00 vs $310 a month for 50,000 support chats)
- you need reasoning / thinking mode — to spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems; AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 does not advertise it
- you generate long outputs in one go — up to 66K tokens (about 49,200 words) per response
- you want the newer model — released 2026-08-31, 13 months after the other
Frequently asked questions
Is AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 better than Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview?
Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview comes out ahead on the data we track: 4 advantages and none for AI21: Jamba Large 1.7.
Which is cheaper, AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 or Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview?
Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper: $0.07 vs $3.50 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 98% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $6.00 against $310.
How much do AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 and Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview cost per million tokens?
AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 costs $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $8.00 per 1M output tokens; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04 input and $0.15 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 or Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview?
Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: 260K tokens, about 390 pages, against 256K (about 384 pages) for AI21: Jamba Large 1.7.
Do AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 and Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview support function calling and JSON output?
Tool calling — AI21: Jamba Large 1.7: yes, Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: yes. JSON-schema structured output — AI21: Jamba Large 1.7: yes, Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: yes.
Can AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 or Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview read images?
Neither accepts image input — both are text-in models.
Is AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 or Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 and Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview?
AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 can write up to 4K tokens (about 3,100 words) per response; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview up to 66K (about 49,200 words).
When were AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 and Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview released?
AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 was listed on 2025-08-08; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview on 2026-08-31.
About the two models
AI21: Jamba Large 1.7
Jamba Large 1.7 is the latest model in the Jamba open family, offering improvements in grounding, instruction-following, and overall efficiency. Built on a hybrid SSM-Transformer architecture with a 256K context...
Full AI21: Jamba Large 1.7 specs →Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview
Mercury 2.5 is the fastest reasoning LLM, and the latest diffusion LLM (dLLM) from Inception. Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2.5 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...
Full Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview specs →