Neither wins outright: Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is the pick when cost matters at scale, OpenAI: GPT Audio when you need to fit long inputs in one request.
| Spec | Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | OpenAI: GPT Audio |
|---|---|---|
| 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, audio |
| Output types | text | text, audio |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2024-04-17 | 2026-01-19 |
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 Audio | 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 Audio | 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 | — | — | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | ✓ Yes | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | — | — | 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 Audio when you need to fit long inputs in one request. In short: Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct when cost matters at scale, you need file / PDF input, you generate long outputs in one go; OpenAI: GPT Audio when you need to fit long inputs in one request, you need audio input, you need log-probabilities, you want the newer model.
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 Audio costs $2.50 input and $10.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
OpenAI: GPT Audio: 128K tokens, about 192 pages, against 66K (about 98 pages) for Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct.
Tool calling — Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: yes, OpenAI: GPT Audio: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: yes, OpenAI: GPT Audio: yes.
Neither accepts image input — both are text-in models.
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 Audio up to 16K (about 12,300 words).
Mistral: Mixtral 8x22B Instruct was listed on 2024-04-17; OpenAI: GPT Audio on 2026-01-19.
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 →The gpt-audio model is OpenAI's first generally available audio model. The new snapshot features an upgraded decoder for more natural sounding voices and maintains better voice consistency. Audio is priced...
Full OpenAI: GPT Audio specs →