GPT-6 Luna Max vs Mistral Large 4 High: which responds faster?

GPT-6 Luna (Max) and Mistral Large 4 (High) are close rivals from OpenAI and Mistral. What separates them most is responsiveness; GPT-6 Luna Max takes 2.0 minutes to produce its first token, Mistral Large 4 High 1.7 seconds. What follows is built entirely from tracked data, so where the catalogue is silent, this page says so instead of guessing.

Mistral Large 4 High is the faster writer

Measured output speed is 121 tokens per second for GPT-6 Luna Max and 139 tokens per second for Mistral Large 4 High. On long outputs, that is a real advantage for Mistral Large 4 High. The wait for the first token averages 2.0 minutes on GPT-6 Luna Max against 1.7 seconds on Mistral Large 4 High. Mistral Large 4 High gets to its first token 70 times as fast. Waits that long are felt on every chat-style request, though they matter less for batch jobs.

For an 800-token response, first token plus generation comes to roughly 2.1 minutes on GPT-6 Luna Max and 7.5 seconds on Mistral Large 4 High.

The headline benchmark

GPT-6 Luna Max comes out ahead on the intelligence index, 27.9 to 26.1. The lead is visible but narrow, so it should not decide the choice on its own.

Across the 109 active models with an intelligence score in the catalogue, GPT-6 Luna Max ranks 62nd and Mistral Large 4 High ranks 65th.

For coding or maths work specifically, the catalogue has no dedicated index on either side yet.

Release timing

GPT-6 Luna Max came first, on September 22, 2026; Mistral Large 4 High followed on October 29, 2026. They are effectively contemporaries.

Price per token

GPT-6 Luna Max lists $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens; Mistral Large 4 High lists $0.70 and $2.10. Mistral Large 4 High costs 4.2 times as much per output token.

For a sample workload of 1 million input tokens and 200,000 output tokens, GPT-6 Luna Max would cost $0.20 and Mistral Large 4 High $1.12, a difference of $0.92. A bigger example, an agent that reads 50 million tokens and writes 5 million in a month, costs $7.50 on GPT-6 Luna Max and $45.50 on Mistral Large 4 High: a gap of $38.00.

Value for money

Per point of intelligence index, GPT-6 Luna Max costs $0.0072 of blended price per million tokens and Mistral Large 4 High $0.040. GPT-6 Luna Max scores higher and costs less per point, so on price per point there is nothing to trade off.