On Thursday, French lab Mistral AI launched Small 3, which the corporate calls “essentially the most environment friendly mannequin of its class” and says is optimized for latency.
Mistral says Small 3 can compete with Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 32B, amongst different giant fashions, and it is “a wonderful open alternative for opaque proprietary fashions like GPT4o-mini.”
Like Mistral’s different fashions, the 24B-parameter Small 3 is open-source, launched beneath the Apache 2.0 license.
Designed for native use, Small 3 offers a base for constructing reasoning talents, Mistral says. “Small 3 excels in situations the place fast, correct responses are vital,” the discharge continues, noting that the mannequin has fewer layers than comparable fashions, which helps its velocity.
The mannequin achieved higher than 81% accuracy on the MMLU benchmark check, and was not educated with reinforcement studying (RL) or artificial information, which Mistral says makes it “earlier within the mannequin manufacturing pipeline” than DeepSeek R1.
“Our instruction-tuned mannequin performs competitively with open weight fashions 3 times its dimension and with proprietary GPT4o-mini mannequin throughout Code, Math, Common data and Instruction following benchmarks,” the announcement notes.
Utilizing a third-party vendor, Mistral had human evaluators check Small 3 with greater than 1,000 coding and generalist prompts. A majority of testers most well-liked Small 3 to Gemma-2 27B and Qwen-2.5 32B, however numbers have been extra evenly break up when Small 3 went up towards Llama-3.3 70B and GPT-4o mini. Mistral acknowledged the discrepancies in human judgment that make this check differ from standardized public benchmarks.
Mistral recommends Small 3 for constructing customer-facing digital assistants, particularly for quick-turnaround wants like fraud detection in monetary companies, authorized recommendation, and healthcare, as a result of it may be fine-tuned to create “extremely correct material consultants,” in keeping with the discharge.
Small 3 may also be used for robotics and manufacturing and could also be best for “hobbyists and organizations dealing with delicate or proprietary data,” since it may be run on a MacBook with a minimal of 32GB RAM.
Mistral teased that we are able to anticipate extra fashions of various sizes “with boosted reasoning capabilities within the coming weeks.” You possibly can entry Small 3 on HuggingFace right here.