Codestral 22B vs o3

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.

o3

OpenAI

OpenAI o3, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large reasoning model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing to deliver improved performance on complex math, science, and coding tasks. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with demonstrated strong results on mathematics and software engineering benchmarks. o3 targets demanding analytical and engineering tasks where deliberate, multi-step reasoning produces significantly better outcomes than direct generation.