Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Mini.
• Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI: Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Deprecated on Together AI (Reference)).
| Metric | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI | GPT-5.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Alibaba / Qwen | OpenAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.35 | $0.30 | GPT-5.6 Mini (14% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.175 | $0.03 | GPT-5.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.40 | $1.20 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 400k | GPT-5.6 Mini (400k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 16.4k | GPT-5.6 Mini |
| Tokenizer Family | Qwen Byte-level BPE (~152k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base (200k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI when your engineering requirements prioritize Alibaba / Qwen's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Qwen Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $0.35/M input rate.
Opt for GPT-5.6 Mini when looking for OpenAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (400k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.2/M rate.