Mistral Small 3: The 24B Model That’s About to Disrupt Open-Source AI

KoshurAI
4 min readJan 31, 2025

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Forget massive, slow models. Mistral’s latest release is blazing fast, powerful, and ready to be deployed on your laptop.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Introduction

Have you ever felt like the world of AI was only for those with massive servers and deep pockets? That’s starting to change, and Mistral AI is at the forefront of this revolution. Their new release, Mistral Small 3, is not just another model; it’s a game-changer. This 24-billion parameter model is designed for speed and efficiency, rivaling giants like Llama 3.3 70B, and available under the Apache 2.0 license. Yes, you read that right: open source and lightning fast. Prepare to be amazed because this is more than just a number; it’s a paradigm shift.

Why You Should Be Excited

Mistral Small 3 isn’t about bragging rights on benchmark scores; it’s designed for real-world use cases. Here’s why you need to pay attention:

  • Speed Demon: Forget the latency issues of larger models. Mistral Small 3 is designed for low latency, beating out other open models and even some proprietary models. We’re talking 3x faster than Llama 3.3 70B on the same hardware. That’s like going from a dial-up modem to fiber internet.
  • Power-Packed: This model punches above its weight class. Mistral Small 3 is competing with models three times its size, delivering top-tier performance for the ‘80%’ of everyday generative AI tasks. We’re no longer making trade offs in terms of size vs performance.
  • Open & Free: Released under the Apache 2.0 license, it’s entirely open-source. Download it, customize it, use it anywhere you want — no strings attached. The power is in our hands now and it’s completely free!

How it Stacks Up

Mistral Small 3 isn’t just talk; it has benchmarks to prove it. Here’s a quick look at the impressive numbers:

  • Human Evaluations: Mistral conducted blind comparisons against other models using over 1000 prompts. Independent evaluators consistently preferred the responses from Mistral Small 3.
  • Instruct Performance: The instruction-tuned model holds its own against much larger models across coding, math, general knowledge, and instruction following. They’re basically saying that, even when it’s instructed on a task, the output is on par with the best.
  • Pretraining Performance: Even the base model is impressive, rivalling models like Llama 3.3 70B. This means that this base model, that has not been trained with RL or synthetic data is already quite strong.

Where Can You Use Mistral Small 3?

Mistral Small 3 isn’t just for the lab. It’s versatile enough for:

  • Fast Conversational Assistance: Need a snappy, accurate chatbot? This is your model.
  • Low-Latency Function Calls: Ideal for automated workflows and agentic tasks.
  • Fine-Tuned Subject Matter Experts: Customize it for legal advice, medical diagnostics, and more.
  • Local Inference: Run it privately on a single RTX 4090 or a MacBook with 32 GB of RAM. No cloud needed!

How to Get Your Hands on It

Ready to start experimenting? You can access Mistral Small 3 on:

🔗 Now Available On:

Hugging Face
Ollama
Kaggle
Together AI
Fireworks AI

Concluding Thoughts

Mistral Small 3 is a statement, not just a model. It shows that powerful AI can be accessible and fast. As Mistral continues to move towards fully open-source models, they are democratizing the power of AI. This is a win for researchers, hobbyists, developers, and anyone excited about the future of AI. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get building!

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KoshurAI
KoshurAI

Written by KoshurAI

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