Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Mistral Large 4 is more accurate: 50.0% against 33.8% on the same 80 questions, a 16.2-point gap that is statistically significant.
- Ministral 3 14B 2512 is 36× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00031 vs $0.011), reasoning tokens included.
- Mistral Large 4 generates text 2.6× faster: 83 tokens per second against 32.
- Ministral 3 14B 2512 starts answering sooner: 0.6 s to the first token, against 1.1 s for Mistral Large 4.
- Mistral Large 4 accepts more context: 1M tokens against 262k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Ministral 3 14B 2512 for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00092 against $0.023), a quicker first token, shorter outputs (about 1,255 tokens per question against 2,613) and open weights you can run yourself. Choose Mistral Large 4 for the most accurate answers of the two, faster streaming and a 1M-token context window. The widest subject gap is in science: Mistral Large 4 answered 20 of 30 correctly, Ministral 3 14B 2512 8 of 30. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -16.2 points (z = -2.08). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.