Mistral Small 3 24B vs Qwen2.5 14B Instruct

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct is a 14-billion-parameter language model from Alibaba released in September 2024 within the Qwen2.5 family, occupying the mid-tier of the series between efficiency-focused small models and the high-capability 72B flagship. Trained on 18 trillion tokens with emphasis on instruction alignment, code understanding, and multilingual reasoning, it offers a strong performance-to-compute ratio for developers who need more capability than 7B but cannot serve 32B or larger models. The model supports 128K context windows and structured output generation out of the box.