Mistral Small 3 vs Qwen vs DeepSeek vs ChatGPT: Capabilities, speed, use cases and more compared

The landscape of generative AI is evolving rapidly, with companies racing to build more efficient, capable, and accessible models. Among the latest entrants, Mistral Small 3, Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Max, and DeepSeek R1 are vying for dominance alongside OpenAI’s established ChatGPT. Each model presents a unique approach to AI and used cases.

Mistral Small 3

Mistral AI’s latest model, Mistral Small 3, is a 24-billion-parameter model claimed to be optimised for low-latency applications. Released under the open Apache 2.0 licence, it is positioned as a direct competitor to larger models like Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 32B, which claimed to boast three times the speed while maintaining similar performance levels. As per the company, Mistral Small 3 excels in:

• Fast-response conversational AI
• Domain-specific fine-tuning for specialised knowledge
• Local deployment, capable of running on a single RTX 4090 or MacBook with 32GB RAM

Qwen2.5-Max

Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Max is an extremely large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens. It is claimed to leverage Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to enhance its capabilities. The Chinese company suggests that in the benchmarks, the platform outperforms DeepSeek V3 in various tests, including Arena-Hard and LiveBench, while also competing closely with GPT-4o.

Qwen2.5-Max is claimed to stand out for:

• Strong performance in general reasoning and knowledge-based tasks
• Advanced coding capabilities tested through LiveCodeBench
• Availability via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek R1, another open-source contender, emphasises accrued reasoning and task specialisation. Unlike Mistral Small 3, which is not trained with RL or synthetic data, DeepSeek R1 leverages reinforcement learning techniques to enhance response quality. While DeepSeek R1 is not as widely benchmarked against GPT-4o or Claude-3.5, it serves as a valuable resource for researchers and developers interested in experimenting with an open-weight AI model.

ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, particularly the latest iterations like GPT-4o, remains the benchmark for commercial AI performance. While proprietary, it benefits from extensive post-training and reinforcement learning, making it capable of reasoning, conversational coherence, and creative generation. ChatGPT is widely used in:

• General knowledge and reasoning tasks
• Business applications for customer support and automation
• Creative writing and problem-solving

While each model has its strengths, the choice between them depends on the use case. Mistral Small 3 is ideal for users prioritising speed and local deployment, Qwen2.5-Max offers powerful large-scale intelligence, DeepSeek R1 provides an open-source alternative, and ChatGPT remains a commercial gold standard in generative AI.