Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Ministral 3 8B 2512 scored 42.5% and Mistral Large 4 50.0% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 is 42× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00027 vs $0.011), reasoning tokens included.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 generates text 1.5× faster: 124 tokens per second against 83.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 starts answering sooner: 0.3 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 8B 2512 for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00063 against $0.023), faster streaming, a quicker first token, shorter outputs (about 1,496 tokens per question against 2,613) and open weights you can run yourself. Choose Mistral Large 4 for a 1M-token context window. The widest subject gap is in science: Mistral Large 4 answered 20 of 30 correctly, Ministral 3 8B 2512 10 of 30. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -7.5 points (z = -0.95). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.