GPT-6.1 Terra vs Mercury 3
GPT-6.1 Terra took 5 min 29 s and $0.15 at list price, Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price. Mercury 3 took 1.4× as long, and GPT-6.1 Terra cost 2.3× as much.
GPT-6.1 Terra
OpenAI · $5.00/M out · 706 HN pts
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Pelican
Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
Watch
Draw a mechanical wristwatch that shows the current local time, with a sweeping seconds hand and a date window. Make it look expensive.
Landing
Build the landing page for Lumen Cycles, a Copenhagen workshop that builds custom cargo bikes to order. Make it look like a real brand you would trust with 4,000 euros.
Breakout
Make a Breakout game I can play right now with the keyboard or the mouse. Give it several levels, a score and some juice.
Logo
Design a logo for Night Heron, an independent bookshop that only opens after dark.
About
Write the opening of the About us page for Patchbay, a three-person studio in Rotterdam that repairs vintage synthesizers. About 150 words.
Patchbay is a three-person studio in Rotterdam, dedicated to repairing vintage synthesizers and keeping them in use.
Old instruments have a way of becoming familiar: the feel of a key, the response of a filter, the particular sound a circuit makes when it’s working as it should. When something goes wrong, we take the time to understand both the fault and the instrument around it. We work carefully, preserving original parts wherever practical and making repairs with the long term in mind.
Our studio brings together a shared interest in electronics, sound and the machines that connect them. Whether a synthesizer has a stubborn key, a noisy output or has been silent for years, we’re interested in finding a way forward.
We work with musicians, collectors and anyone who wants to hear an old instrument come to life again. If you have a synth that needs attention, we’d be glad to hear about it.
Patchbay is a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, tucked between a bike shop and a coffee roastery, where vintage synthesizers come to live another life. We are not a factory and we are not a museum; we are technicians who love the smell of warm solder and the patience that old circuits demand. Between us we have restored everything from early Moog modulars to battered Junos, and we treat each instrument as if it were the first one we ever opened. There is no assembly line here. Every capacitor is tested, every busbar tracked by hand, and every voice board is listened to twice—once on the bench, once through the speakers of the synth that will use it. Patchbay exists because these machines deserve more than a quick fix. They deserve someone who knows their quirks, their failures, and the strange, beautiful sounds that made us fall in love with them in the first place.
Specs and numbers
| GPT-6.1 Terra | Mercury 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | OpenAI | Inception |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 26 Oct 2026 | 16 Oct 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $1.00 | $0.10 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $5.00 | $0.35 |
| Context | 1,050,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 706 | 258 |
| Time for the six prompts | 5 min 29 s | 7 min 31 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.15 | $0.065 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.083 less at list price, and less on 5 of the 6 prompts. GPT-6.1 Terra was faster: 2 min 2 s less in total, and faster on 3 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, GPT-6.1 Terra's Breakout game plays; Mercury 3's stopped painting.
Rebuild this screen experiment: GPT-6.1 Terra's rebuild matched the screenshot at 95%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: GPT-6.1 Terra's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.