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LLM Index

Mistral vs. Orca

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute Mistral Orca
Developer Mistral AI Microsoft
Current generation Mistral 3 –
Initial release 2023-09-27 2023-06-05
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes No
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Apache 2.0 Noncommercial
Model sizes 3B, 8B, 14B, 675B (41B active) 13B
Links
Website Pricing
Website

Mistral

Mistral is a family of efficient open and hosted models spanning edge deployment through frontier-scale multimodal workloads. Mistral 3 is the current generation.

Mistral AI launched Mistral 7B in September 2023 and followed it with the Mixtral mixture-of-experts models and hosted Small and Large tiers. Mistral 3, released in December 2025 under Apache 2.0, includes dense 3B, 8B, and 14B Ministral models plus Mistral Large 3, a 675B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 41B active parameters. The family supports instruction tuning, reasoning variants, multilingual use, code, and image understanding.

Further reading

Orca

Orca is a descendant of LLaMA developed by Microsoft with finetuning on explanation traces obtained from GPT-4.

Orca-13B is a LLM developed by Microsoft. It is based on LLaMA with finetuning on complex explanation traces obtained from GPT-4. By using rich signals, Orca surpasses the performance of models such as Vicuna-13B on complex tasks. However, given its model backbone and the data used for its finetuning, Orca is under noncommercial use.

Further reading

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