Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Alibaba / Qwen's Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI and xAI's Grok 4.6 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 | Grok 4.6 Mini | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Alibaba / Qwen | xAI | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $0.35 | $0.40 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI (13% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.175 | $0.10 | Grok 4.6 Mini lower |
| Output / 1M | $0.40 | $1.60 | Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct — Together AI lower |
| Context Window | 128k | 512k | Grok 4.6 Mini (512k) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 8.2k | 64k | Grok 4.6 Mini |
| Tokenizer Family | Qwen Byte-level BPE (~152k vocabulary) | OpenAI o200k_base legacy (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 Grok 4.6 Mini when looking for xAI's tooling integration, specific context window depth (512k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $1.6/M rate.