Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Mistral Small 4 scored 32.5% and Trinity Large Thinking 28.8% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Mistral Small 4 is 1.3× cheaper per question as billed ($0.0019 vs $0.0025), reasoning tokens included.
- Trinity Large Thinking generates text 1.9× faster: 329 tokens per second against 170.
- Mistral Small 4 starts answering sooner: 0.5 s to the first token, against 0.6 s for Trinity Large Thinking.
Which should you choose?
Choose Mistral Small 4 for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.0057 against $0.0087), a quicker first token and open weights you can run yourself. Choose Trinity Large Thinking for faster streaming. The widest subject gap is in medicine: Mistral Small 4 answered 5 of 11 correctly, Trinity Large Thinking 3 of 11. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap +3.8 points (z = 0.51). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.