Mercury 3 vs Grok 4.7
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Grok 4.7 took 18 min 1 s and $0.63 at list price. Grok 4.7 took 2.4× as long and cost 9.7× as much.
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 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.
Patchbay is a three-person studio in Rotterdam devoted to the repair of vintage synthesizers. We work on instruments that have already lived a long life on stages, in studios, and in spare rooms, and we treat each one as something worth keeping rather than replacing. Our benches are set up for careful diagnosis, component-level repair, and the slow work of bringing an old circuit back into reliable use.
The three of us share the shop, the tools, and the jobs. One person may trace a failing voice while another sources a part or recalibrates an oscillator; we pass instruments between us until the sound is right and the hardware is stable. Clients come to us with analog polys, early digital machines, drum boxes, and the odd modular that has been patched and repatched for decades. We listen first, then open the case.
We are not a museum and we are not a showroom. Patchbay exists so that working musicians, collectors, and curious owners in Rotterdam and beyond can keep playing the instruments they already love.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Grok 4.7 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | xAI |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 21 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $2.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $6.00 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 500,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 629 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 18 min 1 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.63 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.56 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 10 min 30 s less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Grok 4.7's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Grok 4.7's rebuild matched the screenshot at 59%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Grok 4.7's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.