Mistral Small 3 24B vs Qwen2.5 32B 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

Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter open-weight model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in September 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5 series trained on 18 trillion tokens. The model is positioned as a high-capability option for developers with access to multi-GPU setups or high-VRAM hardware, offering strong performance on coding, structured reasoning, and multilingual tasks while remaining fully open under Apache 2.0. Its 128K context window and support for structured output generation made it a popular choice for document processing and agentic workflows in the open-source community.