GPT-4.1 mini vs Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

GPT-4.1 mini

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-4.1 family designed for efficient, cost-effective deployments requiring long-context understanding. It features a 1M token context window and native image understanding, with maintained coding and instruction-following capabilities relative to its size. GPT-4.1 mini targets applications needing a balance between response speed, cost, and capability, such as production APIs with high request volumes.

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3.1 is a 24-billion-parameter multimodal model from Mistral AI, released in March 2025 as an update to Mistral Small 3 that added vision understanding and expanded the context window from 32K to 128K tokens. The model accepts both text and image inputs, broadening its applicability to document analysis, image-grounded reasoning, and mixed-media workflows without requiring an increase in parameter count. Released under Apache 2.0, it continued Mistral's pattern of incremental capability gains delivered in compact, practically deployable open-weight packages.