Ministral 3 8B 2512 vs o4 Mini

Overview: In our 12-test suite o4 Mini wins 8 tasks, Ministral 3 8B 2512 wins 1, and 3 tests tie. Detailed walk-through (score scales 1–5):

• Tool calling: o4 Mini 5 vs Ministral 4 — o4 Mini ranks tied for 1st (1 of 54, tied with 16) for function selection and argument accuracy; choose o4 Mini when accurate tool sequencing is required.
• Long context: o4 Mini 5 vs Ministral 4 — o4 Mini tied for 1st (1 of 55, tied with 36); better retrieval at 30K+ tokens in our testing despite Ministral’s larger raw window (262,144 vs 200,000).
• Structured output: o4 Mini 5 vs Ministral 4 — o4 Mini tied for 1st (1 of 54); stronger at JSON/schema compliance in our tests.
• Strategic analysis: o4 Mini 5 vs Ministral 3 — o4 Mini tied for 1st (1 of 54), meaning clearer, nuance-rich tradeoff reasoning in our evaluation.
• Creative problem solving: o4 Mini 4 vs Ministral 3 — o4 Mini ranks 9 of 54 vs Ministral rank 30, producing more non-obvious, feasible ideas in our runs.
• Faithfulness: o4 Mini 5 vs Ministral 4 — o4 Mini ranks tied for 1st (1 of 55); it sticks to source material more reliably in our tests.
• Agentic planning: o4 Mini 4 vs Ministral 3 — o4 Mini ranks 16 of 54 vs Ministral 42, so o4 Mini decomposes goals and recovery paths better in our scenarios.
• Multilingual: o4 Mini 5 vs Ministral 4 — o4 Mini tied for 1st (1 of 55), producing higher-quality non-English outputs in our tests.
• Constrained rewriting: Ministral 5 vs o4 Mini 3 — Ministral tied for 1st (1 of 53) on compression inside hard character limits; it’s the clear winner for strict brevity tasks.
• Classification: tie 4 vs 4 — both tied for top ranks (tied for 1st with many models); either is fine for routing/categorization.
• Persona consistency: tie 5 vs 5 — both tied for 1st.
• Safety calibration: tie 1 vs 1 — both low on refusal calibration in our tests (rank 32 of 55). External math benchmarks (Epoch AI): o4 Mini scores 97.8% on MATH Level 5 and 81.7% on AIME 2025 (these are Epoch AI results, shown in the payload), supporting its strong reasoning/math capacity. Practical meaning: o4 Mini is the stronger multi-task reasoner (tooling, long-context retrieval, structured outputs, multilingual/faithful generations). Ministral shines when you need cost efficiency or aggressive constrained rewriting and a very large context window.

Pricing (payload rates are per mTok): Ministral 3 8B 2512 — input $0.15, output $0.15 per mTok. o4 Mini — input $1.10, output $4.40 per mTok. Scaled to common volumes (per 1M tokens = 1,000 × per-mTok): Ministral input = $150 / 1M, output = $150 / 1M (combined input+output = $300 if you pay for 1M of each). o4 Mini input = $1,100 / 1M, output = $4,400 / 1M (combined = $5,500 for 1M input+1M output). At 10M tokens multiply by 10 (Ministral combined = $3,000; o4 Mini combined = $55,000). At 100M tokens multiply by 100 (Ministral combined = $30,000; o4 Mini combined = $550,000). Who should care: startups and high-volume applications (10M+ tokens/month) will see o4 Mini’s costs dominate budgets; teams needing top tool-calling/long-context performance may justify the premium. If you prioritize cost per token or run massive inference pipelines, Ministral 3 8B 2512 is materially cheaper.

Choose Ministral 3 8B 2512 if you: need the lowest per-token cost ($0.15 input/output per mTok), must compress text tightly under hard limits (it wins constrained rewriting), or want the largest context window (262,144 tokens) on a budget. Choose o4 Mini if you: need best-in-suite tool-calling, structured-output compliance, long-context retrieval, multilingual fidelity, and stronger strategic/creative reasoning — and you can absorb the higher price ($1.10 input / $4.40 output per mTok).