ministral-8b-latest vs mistral-large-3

Capability for the money

Not the same tier: mistral-large-3 leads ministral-8b-latest by 20.9 points on hard reasoning (GPQA Diamond), for 5.0× the price. They are level on tool use (τ²-bench), so the premium only pays off on hard reasoning work.

1. Following instructions

   extraction, classification, sticking to a format

   IFBench
   ministral-8b-latest29.1%

   mistral-large-336.2%

   mistral-large-3 +7.1

2. Coding

   writing and fixing code

   LiveCodeBench
   ministral-8b-latest30.3%

   mistral-large-346.5%

   mistral-large-3 +16.2

3. Tool use

   multi-step agent work against real tools

   τ²-bench
   ministral-8b-latest26.6%

   mistral-large-324.6%

   ministral-8b-latest +2.0

4. Hard reasoning

   graduate-level science and multi-step analysis

   GPQA Diamond
   ministral-8b-latest47.1%

   mistral-large-368.0%

   mistral-large-3 +20.9

Averaged over the benchmarks both models sat, ministral-8b-latest returns 221.8 points of pass rate per dollar of blended price against 58.4 — the ratio that decides whether the dearer model earns its rate.

Each figure is a pass rate: the share of that test set the model answered correctly, measured by a third party rather than self-reported by the lab. Rows are different tests of different difficulty, so compare a model against the other model, not one row against the next. And a benchmark is not your workload — it narrows the shortlist, it does not pick for you.