Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna and xAI's Grok 2 mini.
• Grok 2 mini: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Generally Available).
| Metric | GPT-5.6 Luna | Grok 2 mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | OpenAI | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.20 | Identical |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.02 | None | GPT-5.6 Luna lower |
| Output / 1M | $1.20 | $1.00 | Grok 2 mini lower |
| Context Window | 1.05M | 128k | GPT-5.6 Luna (1.05M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 8.2k | GPT-5.6 Luna |
| Tokenizer Family | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for GPT-5.6 Luna when your engineering requirements prioritize OpenAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Exact BPE (o200k_base)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.2/M input rate.
Opt for Grok 2 mini when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1/M rate.