Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct vs Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct is the flagship of Alibaba's Qwen2.5 series, a 72-billion-parameter open-weight model released in September 2024 after training on 18 trillion tokens spanning code, mathematics, and multilingual text. It offers strong generalist performance across coding, instruction-following, and structured reasoning while remaining fully open-weight under Apache 2.0 — a combination that made it a widely referenced model in open-source evaluations and community benchmarking. The 128K context window and built-in structured output support made it a common choice for document analysis and multi-step agentic pipeline development.