Mistral large 3 just shipped at ~97% of gpt-5 for half the api price and it is open weights. the…
mistral large 3 just shipped at ~97% of gpt-5 for half the api price and it is open weights. the labs that spent 2025 insisting closed inference was a moat are about to learn the moat was a coupon.
every procurement team paying a frontier api premium is now overpaying for vibes.
Context
Mistral's announcement of Mistral 3, dated 2 December 2025 in search metadata, includes Mistral Large 3, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 41B active and 675B total parameters. It says the models are released under the Apache 2.0 license, which supports open weights.
The announcement predates the note by many months, so just shipped on 5 September 2026 does not match it unless a later release is meant, and none was located. The claims of about 97% of GPT-5 and half the API price are unverified: no Mistral text read gives either number. A later revision of the model is not ruled out. Moat was a coupon and overpaying for vibes are the author's opinion.
Related work
- Mistral Large 3 (Artificial Analysis) ↗Secondary; snippet shows a December 2025 release and a 0.50 input and 1.50 output price per million tokens.
- mistral-large-latest (LLM Stats) ↗Secondary; snippet only.
Watch next
- A first-party price or benchmark source for the 97% and half-price claims.
Sources
- Introducing Mistral 3 (Mistral AI)mistral.ai
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 5 September 2026 at 12:04 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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