Llama 3.1 405B vs Mistral Small 3
How do these models stack up? Below is an expert side-by-side comparison of specifications, context window capacity, live pricing per million tokens, and standardized benchmark scores for Llama 3.1 405B and Mistral Small 3.
Llama 3.1 405B
Llama 3.1 405B is Meta's largest open-weight language model and one of the most capable openly available models in the world. With 405 billion parameters, it achieves performance competitive with GPT-4 and Claude Opus across benchmarks spanning general knowledge, mathematics, coding, and multilingual tasks. Llama 3.1 405B is released under Meta's custom commercial license, supporting broad use cases including deployment via major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and self-hosted inference with multi-GPU configurations.
Mistral Small 3
Mistral Small 3 is a 24B-parameter language model optimized for low-latency performance across common AI tasks. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, it features both pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions designed...
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Llama 3.1 405B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Mistral |
| Context Window | 131,072 tokens | 32,768 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | 90/100 | 84/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | 550 ms | 120 ms |
| Deployment Model | self hostable | managed api |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2024-07-23 | 2025-01-30 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Mistral Small 3
$0.07
Output Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Mistral Small 3
$0.20
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Benchmark Performance Metrics
Scores show the raw performance percentages verified across key evaluation suites. Higher bars indicate superior accuracy and capability in that domain.
Llama 3.1 405B Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Massive model — requires 8× A100 80GB for FP16 inference
- ▸Available via Together AI, Fireworks, and Bedrock as managed API
Mistral Small 3 Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Fastest TTFT at lowest cost — ideal for high-volume classification
- ▸Not designed for complex reasoning — route multi-step tasks to Mistral Large 3