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Mistral vs. Qwen

LLM Comparison


Mistral

Mistral

Overview

Developed by some of the researchers behind Llama, the Mistral large language models were an early standard for accessible and performant open source models.


Mistral AI offers 7B and mixture-of-experts models (8x7B Mixtral and 8x22B Mixtral) that are competitive or better than commercial models of similar size. Available under the Apache 2.0 license, the Mistral models are now also available via most cloud vendors. The latest Mixtral 8x22B represents state-of-the-art performance in the open-source domain. Mistral AI has also begun offering proprietary Small, Large, and Edge models via their business API.


Initial release: 2023-09-27

Qwen

Qwen

Overview

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language models, including chat models, code models, and multimodal variants. Qwen 3 and QwQ are the latest releases, with strong reasoning capabilities.


Qwen (formerly Tongyi Qianwen) is a comprehensive family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. The series includes base models, chat models, code-specific variants (CodeQwen), and multimodal models (Qwen-VL). Qwen models excel at multilingual tasks and have become particularly popular in Asia. The latest releases include Qwen 3 and QwQ (focused on reasoning), competing effectively with Western counterparts while offering strong Chinese language support.


Initial release: 2023-09-13

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Mistral

Qwen

Products & Features
Instruct Models
Coding Capability
Customization
Finetuning
Open Source
License Apache 2.0 Custom
Model Sizes 7B, 8x7B, 8x22B 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B, 72B