Model comparison
Llama 3-8B vs Mistral Small 3
Mistral Small 3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.2 to 25.5 on the Noometry Index.
Last verified . 22 shared benchmarks.
Meta
Mistral AISummary
- They share 22 benchmarks with published results for both. Llama 3-8B scores higher in 1 category and Mistral Small 3 in 7 categories; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Mistral Small 3 leads 25.1 to 7.8.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 26.1% for Llama 3-8B and 47.3% for Mistral Small 3.
Side by side
| Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 25.5 | 31.2 |
| Released | 2024-04-18 | 2025-01-30 |
| Weights | Open | Open |
| Context window | — | 33K |
| Max output | — | 16K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $0.05 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $0.08 |
| Results tracked | 34 | 24 |
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Category by category
Coding Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 31.0 (#289), Mistral Small 3: 36.5 (#207)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 31.9% | 45.3% |
| LMArena Coding | 1152 | 1246 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 36.9% | 50.4% |
| HumanEval+ | 56.7% | — |
| MBPP+ | 54.8% | — |
Reasoning Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 14.3 (#326), Mistral Small 3: 18.9 (#273)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | 0% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1133 | 1233 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 116.45 | 127.07 |
| DTBench | 43.9% | — |
| Adversarial NLI | 57.3% | — |
| ForecastBench | 58.6 | — |
| WinoGrande | 75.7% | — |
Math Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 8.8 (#323), Mistral Small 3: 16.3 (#295)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.9% | 6.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1151 | 1240 |
| MATH Level 5 | 6.1% | — |
Knowledge Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 7.8 (#308), Mistral Small 3: 25.1 (#263)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 26.1% | 47.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1113 | 1202 |
| Confabulations | — | 25.2% |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 82.8% | — |
| MMLU | 68.8% | — |
| OpenBookQA | 82.6% | — |
| TriviaQA | 67.7% | — |
Multilingual Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 30.8 (#261), Mistral Small 3: 37.3 (#236)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1098 | 1198 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1076 | 1204 |
| LMArena French | 1159 | 1203 |
| LMArena German | 1104 | 1211 |
| LMArena Japanese | 967 | 1111 |
| LMArena Korean | 1004 | 1188 |
| LMArena Russian | 1109 | 1216 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1173 | — |
Instruction Following Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 58.4 (#260), Mistral Small 3: 63.7 (#229)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1127 | 1214 |
Long Context Mistral Small 3 leads
Llama 3-8B: 34.2 (#251), Mistral Small 3: 37.8 (#211)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1128 | 1246 |
Writing & Preference Llama 3-8B leads
Llama 3-8B: 37.5 (#256), Mistral Small 3: 32.2 (#280)
| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | Mistral Small 3 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1166 | 1234 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1150 | 1195 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1152 | 1217 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 707 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Llama 3-8B better than Mistral Small 3?
Mistral Small 3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 31.2 to 25.5 on the Noometry Index.
Is Llama 3-8B or Mistral Small 3 better for coding?
Mistral Small 3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.5 versus 31.0 in the Noometry coding category.
How many benchmarks do Llama 3-8B and Mistral Small 3 share?
22 benchmarks have published results for both models. Llama 3-8B has 34 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Small 3 has 24.