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Mistral AI vs Dolphin
Mistral is a European lab with open-weight models on every major cloud. Dolphin fine-tunes open models, some built on Mistral's, to drop refusals, and serves them on consumer GPUs.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Mistral AI vs Dolphin: key differences
Mistral sells Medium 3.5, Small 4 and Large 3 with 256K context through its own API, Azure, Bedrock, Vertex AI and more, with EU or US regional endpoints and a Priority Tier with uptime SLAs. Dolphin's releases include Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition. Its API launched in October 2026 with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at $0.01 in and $0.07 out per million tokens on a decentralized network of idle GPUs, with no published speed, context or SLA.
Mistral fits production work that needs SLAs, data residency or self-hosting. Dolphin fits products that need models without vendor-imposed refusals, or very cheap background calls, for teams willing to sign up with a crypto wallet and Telegram.
What Mistral AI and Dolphin do
Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a Paris lab that sells its models through La Plateforme, its own API, and releases most of them as open weights. It consolidated the lineup in 2026. Mistral Medium 3.5, released April 28, is a dense 128B model that merges instruction following, reasoning and coding into one set of weights, and it replaced both Devstral 2 and the Magistral reasoning models. It costs $1.50 in and $7.50 out per million tokens and scores 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified by Mistral's count. Mistral Small 4, a 119B mixture-of-experts model with 6.5B active, costs $0.15 in and $0.60 out. Mistral Large 3, a 675B MoE under Apache 2.0, runs $0.50 in and $1.50 out. All three carry a 256K context window. Mistral Large 4, a 1.05T multimodal MoE with 52B active, entered public preview on October 6, 2026 with a 1M context at $1.36 in and $4.18 out. Its weights are due at the end of October.
Example models: Mistral Large 4, Mistral Medium 3.5
Full Mistral AI profile
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
Full Dolphin profileShould you choose Mistral AI or Dolphin?
Mistral AI
Choose Mistral AI for
- Uptime SLAs and regional endpoints
- Open weights to self-host
- Buying through a major cloud
Dolphin
Choose Dolphin for
- Uncensored fine-tunes, including on Mistral bases
- Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls
- Requests nodes cannot log
Mistral AI vs Dolphin at a glance
| Attribute | Mistral AI |  Dolphin |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights, plus closed Codestral | Open weights, uncensored fine-tunes |
| Flagship models | Mistral Large 4, Medium 3.5, Small 4, Large 3 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B |
| Speed | Unknown | Unknown |
| Price | $0.15–$1.50 in, $0.60–$7.50 out per 1M | $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
| Customization | Forge (enterprise); fine-tuning API deprecated | Own uncensored fine-tunes |
| Deployment | API, Azure, Bedrock, Vertex, self-host | Decentralized serverless API |
| Long context | 1M (Large 4 preview); 256K on others | Unknown |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Mistral AI and Dolphin?
Mistral is a European lab with open-weight models on every major cloud. Dolphin fine-tunes open models, some built on Mistral's, to drop refusals, and serves them on consumer GPUs.
When should I choose Mistral AI over Dolphin?
Uptime SLAs and regional endpoints; Open weights to self-host; Buying through a major cloud.
When should I choose Dolphin over Mistral AI?
Uncensored fine-tunes, including on Mistral bases; Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls; Requests nodes cannot log.
Is Mistral AI or Dolphin cheaper?
Mistral AI: $0.15–$1.50 in, $0.60–$7.50 out per 1M. Dolphin: $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
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