Llama 4 Maverick vs Mistral Small 3 24B

Llama 4 Maverick

Meta AI

Llama 4 Maverick, released by Meta on April 5, 2025, is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 400 billion total parameters and 17 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 1M token context window and supports text and image input, enabling strong performance on both language and vision tasks. Maverick targets open-source deployments requiring large-scale multimodal reasoning, released under Meta's custom license.

Mistral Small 3 24B

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.