Phi-4 14B vs Mistral Small 3

14B model trained primarily on synthetic data. Punches above its weight on reasoning, especially MATH and GPQA. MIT licensed. A standout choice when you want strong reasoning quality without paying 70B-tier hardware costs. Phi-4 in particular demonstrated that careful synthetic-data curation can extract frontier-class reasoning from a relatively small dense model.

24B dense model from Mistral's January 2025 release that competes with Llama 3.3 70B on many tasks at a third of the parameter count. Apache 2.0 licensed and small enough to run on a single 4090 at Q4. Good pick when you want Llama-3.3-70B-class chat quality but at a friendlier hardware budget, or when the licence matters and Llama's community terms don't fit.