Neither wins outright: Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is the pick when cost matters at scale, OpenAI: GPT-4o when you need to fit long inputs in one request.
| Spec | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | OpenAI: GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | OpenAI |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $2.00 | $2.50 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $6.00 | $10.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $3.00 | $4.38 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 20% | 13% |
| Context window | 66K tokens (~98 pages) | 128K tokens (~192 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 11% | 14% |
| Max output per response | 52K tokens (~39,300 words) | 16K tokens (~12,300 words) |
| Input types | text, file | text, image, file |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2024-04-17 | 2024-05-13 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | OpenAI: GPT-4o | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $270 | $388 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct saves $118 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $300 | $400 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct saves $100 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | Doesn't fit context | $420 | — |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $196 | $260 | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct saves $64.00 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | Doesn't fit context | $135 | — |
| Capability | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | OpenAI: GPT-4o | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | — | — | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | — | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | — | ✓ Yes | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | ✓ Yes | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is the pick when cost matters at scale, OpenAI: GPT-4o when you need to fit long inputs in one request. In short: Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct when cost matters at scale, you generate long outputs in one go; OpenAI: GPT-4o when you need to fit long inputs in one request, you need image input, you need built-in web search, you need log-probabilities.
Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is cheaper: $3.00 vs $4.38 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 31% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $270 against $388.
Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct costs $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens; OpenAI: GPT-4o costs $2.50 input and $10.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
OpenAI: GPT-4o: 128K tokens, about 192 pages, against 66K (about 98 pages) for Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct.
Tool calling — Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: yes, OpenAI: GPT-4o: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: yes, OpenAI: GPT-4o: yes.
Only OpenAI: GPT-4o accepts image input; Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is text-only for input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct can write up to 52K tokens (about 39,300 words) per response; OpenAI: GPT-4o up to 16K (about 12,300 words).
Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct was listed on 2024-04-17; OpenAI: GPT-4o on 2024-05-13.
Mistral's official instruct fine-tuned version of [Mixtral 8x22B](/models/mistralai/mixtral-8x22b). It uses 39B active parameters out of 141B, offering unparalleled cost efficiency for its size. Its strengths include: - strong math, coding,...
Full Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct specs →GPT-4o ("o" for "omni") is OpenAI's latest AI model, supporting both text and image inputs with text outputs. It maintains the intelligence level of [GPT-4 Turbo](/models/openai/gpt-4-turbo) while being twice as...
Full OpenAI: GPT-4o specs →