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Novita AI vs Dolphin
Both compete on price. Novita offers 200+ models on a conventional cloud; Dolphin offers one model on a decentralized network of consumer GPUs.
By The Subconscious Team · Updated
Novita AI vs Dolphin: key differences
Novita serves 200+ open models across text, image, video and speech from $0.02 per million tokens, plus GPUs, dedicated endpoints with a 99.5% SLA and agent sandboxes. Dolphin launched its API in October 2026 with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at $0.01 in and $0.07 out, run on idle consumer GPUs with logprob checks against a trusted copy of the model. It publishes no speed, context or SLA, and signup needs a crypto wallet and Telegram.
Novita is the more complete platform and the safer default for most products. Dolphin fits cheap background calls on its one model and teams that need uncensored models, and its requests are encrypted end to end with nodes unable to log them.
What Novita AI and Dolphin do
Novita AI
Novita AI is a San Francisco inference cloud founded in late 2023 by Frank Lewis and Junyu Huang, and it competes on price and breadth. Its serverless API covers 200+ open models across LLMs, image, video, speech, voice cloning and embeddings, with LLM prices starting at $0.02 per million tokens. The API speaks both OpenAI and Anthropic formats. It became an official Hugging Face Inference Partner in April 2026 and was the day-zero launch partner for Google's Gemma 4.
Example models: DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemma 4
Full Novita 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 Novita AI or Dolphin?
Novita AI vs Dolphin at a glance
| Attribute | Novita AI |  Dolphin |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Open weights, uncensored fine-tunes |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4 Pro, Gemma 4 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B |
| Speed | ~36 tok/s on DeepSeek V4 Pro | Unknown |
| Price | From $0.02 per 1M; batch 50% off | $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
| Customization | Hot-swappable LoRA adapters | Own uncensored fine-tunes |
| Deployment | Serverless, GPU cloud, dedicated | Decentralized serverless API |
| Long context | Full 1M on DeepSeek V4 Pro | Unknown |
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Novita AI and Dolphin?
Both compete on price. Novita offers 200+ models on a conventional cloud; Dolphin offers one model on a decentralized network of consumer GPUs.
When should I choose Novita AI over Dolphin?
A wide multimodal catalog; Model APIs, GPUs and sandboxes on one bill; Dedicated endpoints with LoRA adapters.
When should I choose Dolphin over Novita AI?
Very cheap DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls; Models without vendor-imposed refusals; Latency-tolerant background jobs.
Is Novita AI or Dolphin cheaper?
Novita AI: From $0.02 per 1M; batch 50% off. Dolphin: $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.
Related comparisons
Running long-horizon agents?
If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious. Our inference stack treats a long-horizon trace as the primary workload, so speed, cost, and accuracy hold up deep into the trace.