GPT-5.1 vs Ministral 3 3B 2512

Head-to-head across our 12-test suite (wins/ties from our testing): GPT-5.1 wins 7, Ministral 3 3B 2512 wins 1, and 4 are ties. Detailed comparisons: - Strategic analysis: GPT-5.1 scored 5 vs Ministral 2. GPT-5.1 ranks tied for 1st on this metric (rank 1 of 54, tied with 25 others), so expect clearly stronger nuanced tradeoff reasoning and number-based decisions. - Creative problem solving: GPT-5.1 4 vs Ministral 3. GPT-5.1 ranks 9 of 54 (shared), indicating better non-obvious, feasible ideas for product or content ideation. - Long context: GPT-5.1 5 vs Ministral 4. GPT-5.1 is tied for 1st (with 36 others out of 55), so it handles retrieval and coherence at 30K+ tokens more reliably for long documents. - Safety calibration: GPT-5.1 2 vs Ministral 1. GPT-5.1 ranks 12 of 55 (shared), meaning it more reliably refuses harmful prompts while permitting legitimate ones in our tests. - Persona consistency: GPT-5.1 5 vs Ministral 4; GPT-5.1 tied for 1st (with 36 others), so better at maintaining character and resisting injection. - Agentic planning: GPT-5.1 4 vs Ministral 3; GPT-5.1 ranks 16 of 54 (shared), so stronger at decomposition and failure recovery. - Multilingual: GPT-5.1 5 vs Ministral 4; GPT-5.1 tied for 1st (with 34 others), so superior non-English parity in our tests. - Constrained rewriting: GPT-5.1 4 vs Ministral 5 — Ministral 3 3B 2512 wins and is tied for 1st on constrained rewriting (tied with 4 others), so it compresses or reformats content within strict limits more effectively. - Structured output: tie (both 4) — both models are comparable on JSON/schema compliance (rank 26 of 54 shared). - Tool calling: tie (both 4) — both rank 18 of 54 (shared), so function selection and argument accuracy were comparable in our testing. - Faithfulness: tie (both 5) — both tied for 1st (with 32 others), meaning both stick to source material well in our tests. - Classification: tie (both 4) — both tied for 1st (with 29 others), indicating similar routing/categorization accuracy. External benchmarks (supplementary): GPT-5.1 scores 68% on SWE-bench Verified and 88.6% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI). Ministral 3 3B 2512 has no SWE-bench or AIME scores in the payload. These external scores reinforce GPT-5.1's strength on coding/problem-solving and competition-level math in our view, but they are reported as Epoch AI results, not our internal 1–5 scores.

Pricing in the payload is per mTok (per 1,000 tokens). GPT-5.1 charges $1.25 input / $10.00 output per mTok; Ministral 3 3B 2512 charges $0.10 input / $0.10 output per mTok. At a 50/50 input-output split: - 1M tokens (1,000 mTok): GPT-5.1 = $625 input + $5,000 output = $5,625; Ministral = $50 + $50 = $100. - 10M tokens (10,000 mTok): GPT-5.1 = $6,250 + $50,000 = $56,250; Ministral = $500 + $500 = $1,000. - 100M tokens (100,000 mTok): GPT-5.1 = $62,500 + $500,000 = $562,500; Ministral = $5,000 + $5,000 = $10,000. The output cost ratio is 100x (GPT-5.1 $10.00 vs Ministral $0.10), input cost ratio is 12.5x. If you serve high-volume APIs, run large-batch inference, or have predictable high token usage, the cost gap will dominate total TCO; teams on tight budgets or building lower-latency, cost-sensitive features should prefer Ministral 3 3B 2512.

Choose GPT-5.1 if: - You need best-in-class long-context handling (score 5 vs 4), multilingual parity (5 vs 4), strategic analysis (5 vs 2), or stronger persona consistency and agentic planning for complex workflows. Be prepared to pay much higher per-token costs (output $10.00/mTok). Choose Ministral 3 3B 2512 if: - Your priority is cost-efficiency or deployment at scale — output costs are $0.10/mTok (100x cheaper on output) — or you need top-tier constrained rewriting (score 5 vs GPT-5.1's 4). Good fit for high-volume, budget-conscious services or edge/efficient inference where premium reasoning is less critical.