GPT-4o vs Ministral 3 8B 2512

Overview: across our 12-test suite the two models mostly tie: 9 tied, GPT-4o wins agentic planning (4 vs 3), Ministral wins strategic analysis (3 vs 2) and constrained rewriting (5 vs 3). Detailed walk-through:

• Agentic planning: GPT-4o scores 4 vs Ministral 3; GPT-4o ranks 16 of 54 (tied with 25) vs Ministral rank 42 of 54 — meaning GPT-4o is clearly stronger at goal decomposition and failure-recovery tasks in our tests.
• Strategic analysis: Ministral scores 3 vs GPT-4o 2 (Ministral rank 36 vs GPT-4o rank 44 of 54) — Ministral handles nuanced tradeoff reasoning with real numbers better in our suite.
• Constrained rewriting: Ministral scores 5 vs GPT-4o 3 (Ministral tied for 1st of 53) — for tight-character compression and aggressive summarization, Ministral is the practical winner.
• Ties (no clear winner): structured output 4/4 (both rank ~26 of 54), creative problem solving 3/3 (rank 30), tool calling 4/4 (both rank 18), faithfulness 4/4 (rank 34), classification 4/4 (tied for 1st with many models), long context 4/4 (rank 38), safety calibration 1/1 (rank 32), persona consistency 5/5 (tied for 1st), multilingual 4/4 (rank 36). These ties show both models are comparable on schema compliance, tool selection basics, classification and multilingual outputs in our testing.
• External benchmarks (supplementary): GPT-4o posts external scores on third-party tests: SWE-bench Verified 31% (Epoch AI), MATH Level 5 53.3% (Epoch AI), AIME 2025 6.4% (Epoch AI). Ministral has no external scores in the payload. Use these external points for coding/math expectations, but treat them as supplementary to our 12-test internal suite.
  Practical meaning: choose GPT-4o when your workflows need stronger agentic planning and OpenAI’s parameter support; choose Ministral when you need better constrained rewriting, modestly stronger strategic-analysis in our tests, or far lower inference cost.

Costs shown are per 1,000 tokens: GPT-4o input $2.50, output $10.00; Ministral 3 8B 2512 input $0.15, output $0.15. Using a simple 50/50 input-output split, combined cost per 1K tokens is $6.25 for GPT-4o vs $0.15 for Ministral. Monthly spend at those volumes: 1M tokens → GPT-4o $6,250 vs Ministral $150; 10M → $62,500 vs $1,500; 100M → $625,000 vs $15,000. The payload lists a price ratio of 66.67×. If you operate at scale (millions of tokens/month) or on tight budgets, Ministral’s $0.15/mTok pricing materially reduces cloud/ops spend; teams prioritizing agentic workflows or OpenAI integration may accept GPT-4o’s higher cost for its performance in that one winning dimension.

Choose GPT-4o if you prioritize agentic planning (score 4 vs 3), OpenAI’s multimodal parameter set, and can absorb a very high per-token bill — GPT-4o costs $2.50 input / $10.00 output per 1K. Choose Ministral 3 8B 2512 if you need constrained rewriting (5 vs 3), better strategic-analysis in our tests, a larger context window (262,144 vs 128,000) and vastly lower cost ($0.15 input / $0.15 output per 1K). For high-volume production or cost-sensitive apps (chatbots, bulk summarization, vision+text tasks), Ministral is the pragmatic default; for agentic agents or workflows where OpenAI-specific integrations matter, accept GPT-4o’s premium.