Mistral's small 8B parameter model with vision. Cost-effective for simpler tasks and high-throughput workloads.
Ministral 8B (Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410) is Mistral AI's mid-sized edge model, released October 16, 2024 as part of the 'Les Ministraux' family alongside the 3B variant. At 8 billion parameters with a 128K context window and interleaved sliding-window attention for efficient long-context inference, it was designed as a denser, more capable sibling to the 3B for on-device and edge-server deployments where raw throughput matters more than frontier quality.
The model received targeted post-training for function calling and tool use, making it a viable candidate for high-throughput agent pipelines running on modest hardware. For TheRouter operators, Ministral 8B fills the high-volume, low-latency tier between the 3B (ultra-cheap) and 14B (more capable but 1.7x the price). It was succeeded in December 2025 by Ministral 3 8B, which added native vision support and improved benchmarks; the original 2410 checkpoint is now deprecated.
Mistral's original Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410 checkpoint is a deprecated, text-only research-license model; the newer Ministral 3 8B successor added native vision and commercial availability.
TheRouter keeps the mistral/ministral-8b slug callable as an OpenAI-compatible text/chat route, but the curated page treats original-checkpoint vision, throughput, and output-limit details as undisclosed unless the live route is separately verified.
| Type | Rate |
|---|---|
| Input | $0.162 / 1M tokens |
| Output | $0.162 / 1M tokens |
| Release date | 2024-10-16mistral.ai ↗ | verified |
| Architecture | 8B-parameter dense transformer with interleaved sliding-window attention for efficient 128K context inferencemistral.ai ↗ | verified |
| Context window | 128K tokensmistral.ai ↗ | verified |
| Maximum output | Not publicly disclosed by Mistral for the original 2410 checkpointdocs.mistral.ai ↗ | unknown |
| License | Mistral Research License — research and non-commercial use only; commercial license required from Mistral AIhuggingface.co ↗ | verified |
| Hardware requirements | Not publicly disclosed by Mistral for the original 2410 checkpointhuggingface.co ↗ | unknown |
| Status | Deprecated (as of 2025-12-02) — replaced by Ministral 3 8Bdocs.mistral.ai ↗ | verified |
| Benchmark | Distribution | Score | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
MMLU Mistral internal evaluation; outperforms Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral 7B on this metric | 66.0%% | mistral.ai ↗ | |
HumanEval Mistral's launch post compared Ministral 8B on code benchmarks but did not publish a raw HumanEval score for the original 2410 checkpoint | — | Not publicly disclosed | — |
GSM8K Outperforms Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral 7B in Mistral's internal evaluation | 79.0%% | mistral.ai ↗ | |
AGIEval Mistral confirmed AGIEval in the benchmark suite but did not publish raw scores for 8B in the launch post | — | Not publicly disclosed | — |
Use the global api.therouter.ai endpoint shown below for new integrations; the legacy China accelerated endpoint is retired.
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY" -d '{
"model": "mistral/ministral-8b",
"messages": [
{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize the key points from this input."}
]
}'Standard text-to-text chat. Ministral 8B excels at high-throughput conversational workloads.
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $THEROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "mistral/ministral-8b",
"messages": [
{"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
{"role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France?"}
]
}'Mistral launched Ministral 3, a new generation of edge models including 3B, 8B, and a large MoE variant. Ministral 3 8B replaces the original Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410 with native vision support, higher benchmark scores, and continued commercial availability.
Mistral AI released the Ministral 3B and 8B models under the Mistral Research License, targeting on-device and edge deployments. Key innovations included a 128K context window with interleaved sliding-window attention, function calling post-training, and competitive benchmarks against Llama 3.1 8B and Gemma 2 9B.
No. The original Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410 is released under the Mistral Research License (MRL-0.1), which permits research and non-commercial use only. A separate commercial license from Mistral AI is required for production deployments. The successor Ministral 3 8B has a more permissive commercial license. Access through TheRouter API follows the TheRouter provider agreement.
Ministral 3 8B is the successor, released December 2, 2025. Key differences: (1) native vision support added, (2) improved benchmark scores across the board, (3) commercially available without a separate research license restriction, (4) currently active and supported. The original Ministral 8B (2410) is deprecated and research-license-only.
The original Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410 checkpoint is text-only (no vision). The YAML configuration lists vision as supported, which may reflect TheRouter routing a newer Ministral 3 8B checkpoint under the same slug. For guaranteed vision support, use mistral/ministral-14b (which has native vision) or the Ministral 3 8B successor.
| source | URL | retrieved | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Release date | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| Architecture | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| Context window | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| Maximum output | docs.mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-08-24 | unknown |
| License | huggingface.co ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| Hardware requirements | huggingface.co ↗ | 2026-08-24 | unknown |
| Status | docs.mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| MMLU | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| HumanEval | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-08-24 | unknown |
| GSM8K | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| AGIEval | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | unknown |
| Mistral announces Ministral 3 family, deprecating original 2410 checkpoints | docs.mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| Mistral launches Les Ministraux — Ministral 3B and 8B for edge and on-device AI | mistral.ai/news ↗ | 2026-05-27 | verified |
| Is Ministral 8B free to use commercially? | huggingface.co ↗ | 2026-05-27 | to verify |
| What is the difference between Ministral 8B and Ministral 3 8B? | docs.mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | to verify |
| Does Ministral 8B support vision on TheRouter? | mistral.ai ↗ | 2026-05-27 | to verify |