Question 1

What is Mistral Small 3?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 is a large language model from Mistral, released on 30 January 2025. Excellent latency / cost ratio — open weights, production-ready.

Question 2

When was Mistral Small 3 released?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 was released by Mistral on 30 January 2025.

Question 3

How much does Mistral Small 3 cost?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 costs $0.20 per 1 million input tokens and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens via Mistral’s API. At a typical 3:1 input/output ratio the blended cost works out to about $0.30 per 1M tokens.

Question 4

How smart is Mistral Small 3?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 scores 52 out of 100 on our intelligence index — a capable mid-tier composite of MMLU, MMLU Pro, GPQA, MATH and HumanEval benchmark scores. That places it #21 of 22 language models we track.

Question 5

What is the context window of Mistral Small 3?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 has a 32k-token context window — roughly 24,000 words of text. That’s what you can fit into a single request (your prompt plus all uploaded documents and the model’s response combined).

Question 6

What is Mistral Small 3 best for?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 is most useful for self-hosting, edge deployment and real-time apps. Its key strengths are apache 2.0 license, fast and cheap.

Question 7

How fast is Mistral Small 3?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 generates around 150 output tokens per second with a typical time-to-first-token of 300 ms on the major API providers. Reasoning models that "think" before answering will appear slower on tokens-per-second since they spend time on internal chain-of-thought.

Question 8

Is Mistral Small 3 better than Llama 3.1 8B?

Accepted Answer

Mistral Small 3 scores higher on our intelligence index (52 vs 44). On most general tasks Mistral Small 3 has the edge — but Llama 3.1 8B can still be the better pick on cost or specific capabilities. See our full Mistral Small 3 vs Llama 3.1 8B comparison at /ai-models/compare/mistral-small-3-vs-llama-3-1-8b/.

Question 9

What is the best alternative to Mistral Small 3?

Accepted Answer

The closest alternatives to Mistral Small 3 are Llama 3.1 8B, DeepSeek R1 and GPT-5.5 mini. Each shares most of Mistral Small 3’s use-cases — pick by price, context window or specific capability rather than headline intelligence.

Question 10

Is Mistral Small 3 open source?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Mistral Small 3 is open-source — the weights are publicly available, and you can self-host it or use a hosted provider (Together, Fireworks, Groq, Replicate). Some open-source licenses include usage caveats; check the model’s license file before deploying.

Question 11

Can I use Mistral Small 3 for free?

Accepted Answer

Mistral offers a free tier on Le Chat (chat.mistral.ai) with daily limits. The Mistral API is paid. Open-source Mistral models (including Mistral Small) can be self-hosted for free.

Mistral Small 3

At a glance

Benchmark scores

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