Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between xAI's Grok 4.6 and xAI's Grok 2 mini.
• Grok 2 mini: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Generally Available).
| Metric | Grok 4.6 | Grok 2 mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | xAI | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.20 | Grok 2 mini (90% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.50 | None | Grok 2 mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $6.00 | $1.00 | Grok 2 mini lower |
| Context Window | 500k | 128k | Grok 4.6 (500k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 128k | 8.2k | Grok 4.6 |
| Tokenizer Family | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | xAI Byte-level BPE (~131k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Grok 4.6 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 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.