Codestral 22B vs Grok 3

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.

Grok 3

xAI

Grok 3, released by xAI in February 2025, is a large language model trained on xAI's Colossus supercluster with substantially increased compute over previous generations. It features a 1M token context window, RL-enhanced Think mode for extended reasoning, and demonstrated strong results on mathematics, coding, and scientific benchmarks. Grok 3 targets complex reasoning, real-time information tasks via X platform integration, and agentic workflows via the xAI API.