In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- MiniMax-M3 is cheaper per output token: $1.20 against $2.09 per million tokens, so Mistral Large 4 costs 1.7 times as much.
- MiniMax-M3 can be downloaded and run on your own machine; Mistral Large 4 can't.
- No independent board we follow ranks both models yet.
Side by side
The specs.
| MiniMax-M3 | Mistral Large 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | MiniMax · China | Mistral AI · France |
| Released | Not stated | Oct 6, 2026 |
| Price per 1M tokens | $0.30 in / $1.20 out | $0.68 in / $2.09 out (sale price) |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text | text, image |
| Download and run it yourself | Yes (minimax-community (license tag shown on Hugging Face)) | No |
| Size | ~428B parameters, ~23B active | 1.05T parameters, 52B active |
| Maker says | “MiniMax-M3 is a native multimodal model with 1M context.” | “Mistral Large 4 is a state-of-the-art, open-weight, general-purpose multimodal model with a granular Mixture-of-Experts” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
| Board | MiniMax-M3 | Mistral Large 4 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond (run by Vals AI, archived)Vals AI, Sep 1, 2026 | #15 | Not listed |
More comparisons