Llama 3 8B vs Mistral 7B: Small LLM Pricing Considerations

In the competitive landscape of small language models, Llama 3 8B and Mistral 7B offer distinct advantages and trade-offs for users seeking cost-effective AI solutions. Llama 3 8B, introduced by Meta in April 2024, features 8 billion parameters and excels in tasks like text summarization, sentiment analysis, and language translation, outperforming Mistral 7B on popular leaderboards. Despite its superior performance and broader language support, Llama 3 8B is more expensive, with its pricing through Amazon Bedrock being significantly higher than Mistral 7B, which is 62.5% less expensive for input tokens and 66.7% less for output tokens. Mistral 7B, a dense transformer model released in September 2023, remains popular for its balance between performance and affordability, making it a cost-efficient choice for tasks such as text summarization and code completion. While Llama 3 8B offers a faster inference speed and was trained on a more extensive dataset, Mistral 7B is more regionally available, being performative in English, and presents a compelling option for budget-conscious companies processing large volumes of data.