Mistral Small but Mighty: A Powerful Apache 2.0 Multimodal Language Model

Discover Mistral Small but Mighty: A powerful Apache 2.0 multimodal language model that outperforms larger models like GPT-4 on various benchmarks. Explore its capabilities in text, image understanding, and OCR. Learn how this compact model can be a great option for your AI projects.

2025年4月22日

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Discover the power of Mistral Small, a state-of-the-art language model that packs a punch. With its impressive performance, multimodal capabilities, and Apache 2.0 licensing, this model offers a versatile and accessible solution for your AI needs. Explore its capabilities and unlock new possibilities for your projects.

Mistral Small but Mighty Model Overview

The Mistral Small 3.1 model is a state-of-the-art language model developed by Mistral AI, a French startup based in Paris. This model boasts impressive capabilities, including being multimodal, multilingual, and highly performant for its size.

The model has an expanded context window of 128 tokens, on par with the performance of larger models like GPT-3. In benchmarks, Mistral Small 3.1 outperforms or matches the performance of models like GPT-4 Mini and Gemini 3, while offering significantly lower latency and faster tokens per second.

The model's multimodal capabilities allow it to understand and reason about images, perform OCR, and excel on multimodal benchmarks like ChartQA and Document Visual QA. Its multilingual performance is also strong, particularly in European and East Asian languages, although it lags behind larger models in some Middle Eastern languages.

For long-context tasks, Mistral Small 3.1 holds up well, performing better than Gemini 3 and GPT-4 Mini on the Pile 128K dataset, although it falls behind the larger 3.5B Chinchilla model.

The model is available in both base and instruction-tuned versions, and the open-source community has already begun experimenting with converting it into smaller reasoning models, such as the Deep Hermes 24B model.

Overall, Mistral Small 3.1 is a highly capable and efficient model that could be a great candidate for multimodal and multilingual applications, as well as for developing smaller reasoning models.

Benchmarking Performance and Capabilities

The MRAL Small 3.1 model has demonstrated impressive performance across various benchmarks. It is able to either outperform or match the performance of larger models like GPT-4 and Gemma 3, while offering significantly lower latency.

The model's expanded context window of 128 tokens is on par with Gemma 3, allowing it to handle longer-form tasks effectively. On the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks, the MRAL Small 3.1 consistently outperforms its peers in the same size category.

In terms of multimodal capabilities, the model excels at understanding and reasoning about images. It can perform optical character recognition (OCR) and provide structured JSON output, making it a great candidate for document processing tasks.

The model's multilingual performance is also noteworthy, with strong results in European and East Asian languages. However, it lags behind Gemma 3 and GPT-4 for Middle Eastern languages, which is an important consideration for multilingual applications.

For long-context tasks, the MRAL Small 3.1 holds up well, outperforming Gemma 3 and GPT-4 Mini on the Pile 128K dataset. However, it falls behind the larger 3.5B model on the Narration in the Haystack benchmark, though the model has chosen not to report those results.

Overall, the MRAL Small 3.1 is a highly capable model that offers impressive performance and versatility, making it a strong contender in the competitive landscape of large language models.

Multimodal and Multilingual Capabilities

The mral small 3.1 model demonstrates impressive multimodal and multilingual capabilities. It can not only understand and reason about text, but also process and analyze images.

The model's performance on multimodal benchmarks, such as ChartQA and Document Visual QA, is consistently strong, often outperforming other models of similar size. This makes it a great candidate for multimodal applications, particularly in areas like document understanding and visual reasoning.

In terms of multilingual capabilities, the model performs well on European and East Asian languages, but lags behind Gemma 3 and GPT-4 mini for Middle Eastern languages. However, its overall multilingual performance is still quite impressive, especially considering its relatively small size.

The model also has the ability to read and understand images, as demonstrated by the examples provided. It can accurately describe the contents of an image, identify key elements, and even perform OCR to extract structured data from images of documents or receipts.

Overall, the mral small 3.1 model's multimodal and multilingual capabilities make it a versatile and powerful tool for a wide range of applications, from document processing to visual reasoning and beyond.

Using the Mistral Small Model

The Mistral Small 3.1 model is a state-of-the-art language model created by Mistral AI, a French startup. It is a multi-modal, multi-lingual model that can outperform or match the performance of larger models like GPT-3 and Gemma 3 on various benchmarks, while having a smaller model size and faster inference speed.

The model comes with a well-defined system prompt that provides clear instructions on how to interact with it. It emphasizes being tentative about dates and information, and asking for clarification if the user's request is not clear. The model also has limitations, such as not being able to perform web searches or access the internet, and not being able to transcribe audio or video files.

To use the Mistral Small model, you can leverage the Mistral Python client. The model name is "mistral-small-latest", and you can use it for a variety of tasks, such as:

  1. Answering questions: The model can provide concise and informative answers to questions, as demonstrated by its response to the question "What is the best French cheese?".

  2. Text classification: The model can be used as a classifier, as shown in the example of classifying an email as spam or not spam.

  3. Multi-modal understanding: The model has strong multi-modal capabilities, as evidenced by its ability to understand and reason about images, including recognizing the Eiffel Tower and analyzing the socioeconomic indicators in a complex chart.

  4. Optical Character Recognition (OCR): The model can perform OCR on images, as demonstrated by its ability to transcribe the text from a receipt image and generate a structured JSON output.

Overall, the Mistral Small 3.1 model is a highly capable and versatile language model that can be a great option for a variety of applications, especially when a smaller model size and faster inference speed are required.

Conclusion

The mral small 3.1 model is a highly capable and versatile language model that offers impressive performance for its size. It is a direct competitor to the Gemma 3 model released by Google, and it outperforms or matches the performance of larger models like GPT-4 mini on various benchmarks.

The model's key strengths include:

  • Multimodal capabilities: It can understand and reason about images, perform OCR, and provide structured JSON outputs.
  • Multilingual performance: It performs well across European and East Asian languages, although it lags behind Gemma 3 and GPT-4 mini for Middle Eastern languages.
  • Efficient and low-latency: The model can be run on relatively modest hardware, such as an RTX 1490 or a 32GB VRAM Macbook, while maintaining high performance.
  • Versatile use cases: The model can be used for tasks like classification, question answering, and image understanding, making it a great candidate for multimodal applications and agent-based workflows.

The open-source community has already started experimenting with converting the mral small 3.1 model into smaller reasoning models, further expanding its potential applications. Overall, this model is a compelling option for developers and researchers looking for a high-performing, efficient, and versatile language model.

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