# Particle.AI vs Dolphin

> Both are early and both serve DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Particle sells it through Vercel AI Gateway; Dolphin sells it far cheaper on a decentralized network.

Canonical: https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/particle-ai-vs-dolphin · By The Subconscious Team · Updated October 11, 2026

## How they compare

Particle serves DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on Vercel AI Gateway at $0.25 in and $1 out with 1M context, about 193 tokens per second and about 0.5 seconds of latency, alongside GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731. Dolphin serves the same model at $0.01 in and $0.07 out on idle consumer GPUs, but its API launched in October 2026 and publishes no speed, context or SLA. Dolphin signup needs a crypto wallet and Telegram.

Particle is easier to adopt: teams already on Vercel AI Gateway can route to it with no new contract, and its context and speed are published. Dolphin wins on price and on uncensored models, for background work where unpredictable latency and uptime are acceptable.

## What each one does

### Particle.AI

Particle AI is an early San Francisco infrastructure startup with a mission to make intelligence as cheap and abundant as electricity. The team works on post-training, inference optimization and distributed systems, all aimed at pushing down cost per unit of intelligence. It is still hiring its founding team and works fully in person. Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi started it, with backing from Y Combinator, 8VC, Caffeinated Capital and angels including Patrick Collison, Adam D'Angelo and Aaron Levie.

### 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.

## Which is best, and when

### Choose Particle.AI for

- Published 1M context on Flash models
- Access through Vercel AI Gateway
- A fallback route in a multi-provider setup

### Choose Dolphin for

- The lowest price on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
- Models without vendor-imposed refusals
- Latency-tolerant background jobs

## At a glance

| Attribute | Particle.AI | Dolphin |
|---|---|---|
| Model access | Open weights | Open weights, uncensored fine-tunes |
| Flagship models | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Dolphin Mistral 24B |
| Speed | ~193 tok/s on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | - |
| Price | $0.10 in, $0.40 out (GLM 5.3 Flash) | $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) |
| Customization | - | Own uncensored fine-tunes |
| Deployment | Via Vercel AI Gateway | Decentralized serverless API |
| Long context | 1M | - |

## FAQ

### What is the difference between Particle.AI and Dolphin?

Both are early and both serve DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Particle sells it through Vercel AI Gateway; Dolphin sells it far cheaper on a decentralized network.

### When should I choose Particle.AI over Dolphin?

Published 1M context on Flash models; Access through Vercel AI Gateway; A fallback route in a multi-provider setup.

### When should I choose Dolphin over Particle.AI?

The lowest price on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash; Models without vendor-imposed refusals; Latency-tolerant background jobs.

### Is Particle.AI or Dolphin cheaper?

Particle.AI: $0.10 in, $0.40 out (GLM 5.3 Flash). Dolphin: $0.01 in, $0.07 out (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash). The cheaper choice depends on the model and workload.

## Running long-horizon agents?

If your agents run past 200K tokens, compare both against Subconscious: [Subconscious vs Particle.AI](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-particle-ai.md), [Subconscious vs Dolphin](https://www.subconscious.dev/compare/subconscious-vs-dolphin.md).

Full profiles: [Particle.AI](https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/particle-ai.md), [Dolphin](https://www.subconscious.dev/providers/dolphin.md).