Ministral 3 3B
Ministral 3 3B is Mistral AI's smallest edge model, using Cascade Distillation, tied embeddings, a frozen vision encoder, and a 256k context window.
Model Overview
Capabilities, design details, and architectural traits
Ministral 3 3B - The Smallest Model in the Ministral 3 Family
Ministral 3 3B is the smallest and most efficient member of the Ministral 3 family. It is designed for edge deployment, combining compact size with native vision understanding rather than offering text-only capability.
| Trait | Detail |
|---|---|
| Pretraining method | Built using Cascade Distillation, a compute-efficient recipe that distills from a stronger, already post-trained teacher model (Mistral Medium 3.1) instead of training from scratch |
| Architecture | Uses tied embeddings, sharing the embedding and output layers, a design specific to the 3B size within the family since the 8B and 14B variants use separate layers for each |
| Vision encoder | Includes a vision encoder adapted from Mistral Small 3.1 Base, kept frozen, paired with a newly trained projection layer for image understanding |
| Variants | Released as base, instruct, and reasoning versions |
| Context window | Supports a 256k context window |
Open and Edge-Focused
Ministral 3 3B is released under the Apache 2.0 license as open weights, and is built to run across diverse hardware, including local setups, rather than being restricted to large-scale cloud deployment.
Benchmark Performance
Independent evaluations · Artificial Analysis
Accuracy & Capability Details
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Evaluate specifications, pricing, and independent benchmark indices
| Model Details | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| General Info | |||
| Provider | Mistral | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Release Date | December 2, 2025 | September 22, 2026 | September 28, 2026 |
| Knowledge Cutoff | - | - | Jun 2026 |
| Context & Limits | |||
| Context Window | 256K | 1M Best Context Window | 1M Best Context Window |
| Pricing (per 1M tokens) | |||
| Input Pricing | $0.10 Best Input Pricing | $4 | $2 |
| Output Pricing | $0.10 Best Output Pricing | $20 | $10 |
| Modalities | |||
| Inputs | textimage | textimagefile | textimagefile |
| Outputs | text | text | text |
| Benchmarks (0-100) | |||
| Intelligence Index | 4.8 | 57.6 Best Intelligence Index | 56.0 |
| Coding Index | 4.8 | - | - |
| Agentic Index | 0.8 | - | - |
Humanity's Last Exam
Extremely difficult logical reasoning and knowledge.
Long Context Reasoning
Logical reasoning over long context windows.
SciCode Benchmark
Scientific coding and mathematical modeling.
Independent evaluation data provided by Artificial Analysis. To view the latest benchmarks and full details, visit their official site.
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