Mistral Small 3 24B vs o4 mini

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.

o4 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o4 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o4 family that combines multimodal understanding with efficient chain-of-thought processing. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with strong performance on mathematics and coding benchmarks relative to its inference cost. o4 mini targets cost-sensitive applications requiring both visual reasoning and mathematical accuracy.