Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between xAI's Grok 2 and Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI.
• Grok 2: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Generally Available).
• Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Deprecated on Together AI (Reference)).
| Metric | Grok 2 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | xAI | Alibaba / Qwen | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.35 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI (83% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | None | $0.175 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI lower |
| Output / 1M | $10.00 | $0.40 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 128k | Equal |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 8.2k | Grok 2 |
| Tokenizer Family | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | Qwen Byte-level BPE (~152k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Grok 2 when your engineering requirements prioritize xAI's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated xAI Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $2/M input rate.
Opt for Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI when looking for Alibaba / Qwen's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $0.4/M rate.