Alibaba Cloud vs Dolphin

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud serves the Qwen model family through Model Studio, its managed AI platform. The flagship Qwen 3.8-Max takes text, image and video input with a 1M token context, function calling, structured outputs and built-in web search. International pricing is $2 in and $6 out per million tokens, with implicit cache hits at $0.25. Deployments in China and some global regions list lower, at $1.65 in and about $4.95 out, and Alibaba often runs limited-time discounts, including night-time cuts of up to 80% on Qwen 3.7-Max.

Example models: Qwen 3.8-Max, Qwen 3.7-Max

Dolphin

Dolphin began in 2023 as Eric Hartford's series of open-source, uncensored fine-tunes, trained to drop the refusals and baked-in guidelines of their base models so that the developer sets the rules through the system prompt. Current releases include Dolphin Llama 3.1 8B and Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition, built with Venice, and the project publishes nearly 100 models on Hugging Face. It also runs a chat app, a Telegram bot and a synthetic data service that generates answers to commonly refused prompts.

Example models: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B

Alibaba Cloud

Choose Alibaba Cloud for

• Enterprise buyers inside a full public cloud
• Multimodal Qwen 3.8-Max with 1M context
• EU and Asia regional deployment

Dolphin

Choose Dolphin for

• Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls
• Batch work that tolerates variable latency
• Models without vendor-imposed refusals