Inkling 2 Small vs Mistral Large 4 Preview: which is cheaper?

Inkling 2 Small (Thinking Machines) and Mistral Large 4 Preview (Mistral) meet here on their recorded benchmark, price and speed data. What follows is built entirely from tracked data, so where the catalogue is silent, this page says so instead of guessing. Price separates them more than anything else; on a blended basis Mistral Large 4 Preview costs 2.2 times as much as Inkling 2 Small.

Price per token

Per million tokens, Inkling 2 Small charges $0.30 for input and $1.00 for output, while Mistral Large 4 Preview charges $0.70 and $2.10. For output tokens, Mistral Large 4 Preview is 2.1 times the price of Inkling 2 Small.

For a sample workload of 1 million input tokens and 200,000 output tokens, Inkling 2 Small would cost $0.50 and Mistral Large 4 Preview $1.12, a difference of $0.62. For a chat app with 50,000 sessions of 800 input and 300 output tokens, Inkling 2 Small would come in 55% lower: $27.00 for Inkling 2 Small against $59.50 for Mistral Large 4 Preview. On a 3:1 blend of input to output tokens, that works out to $0.475 versus $1.05 per million.

Inkling 2 Small leads on the intelligence index

The catalogue puts Inkling 2 Small at 30.6 and Mistral Large 4 Preview at 25.3 on its intelligence index. That is a clear margin for an index that averages many evaluations. Put another way, Mistral Large 4 Preview would need 21% more on this index to draw level.

Across the 109 active models with an intelligence score in the catalogue, Inkling 2 Small ranks 52nd and Mistral Large 4 Preview ranks 67th.

Neither model has a separate coding or math index recorded yet, so those narrower comparisons will have to wait for more data.

Score per dollar

Dividing the blended price by the intelligence index gives a rough cost per point: $0.016 for Inkling 2 Small and $0.042 for Mistral Large 4 Preview, per million tokens. Inkling 2 Small scores higher and costs less per point, so on price per point there is nothing to trade off.

Speed and latency

Measured output speed is 139 tokens per second for Inkling 2 Small and 130 tokens per second for Mistral Large 4 Preview. Throughput is close to level. The wait for the first token averages 2.2 seconds on Inkling 2 Small against 1.9 seconds on Mistral Large 4 Preview. Inkling 2 Small waits 1.2 times as long before its first token.

For a 400-token response, first token plus generation comes to roughly 5.1 seconds on Inkling 2 Small and 5.0 seconds on Mistral Large 4 Preview.

Which is newer

Mistral Large 4 Preview came first, on October 6, 2026; Inkling 2 Small followed on November 5, 2026. That is close enough to count them as the same generation.