Mistral Medium 3 24B (dense)
Dense variant in the Mistral Medium 3.5 family. Research license — non-commercial open. Same training data as the MoE flagship but in a smaller dense package.
Positioning
Mistral Medium 3 24B is a dense variant within the Mistral Medium 3.5 family, released by Mistral AI under the Mistral Research License. With 24 billion parameters and a 262,144-token context window, it offers a smaller, dense alternative to the MoE flagship model, trained on the same data. This model is positioned for research and non-commercial workstation deployments, providing a balance of capacity and accessibility for local experimentation.
Strengths
- Massive context window: 262,144 tokens of context enable processing of very long documents, codebases, or multi-turn conversations without truncation.
- Dense architecture simplicity: Unlike MoE variants, this dense model has predictable memory and compute requirements, making resource planning straightforward.
- Research-friendly license: The Mistral Research License permits non-commercial use, ideal for academic study, prototyping, and personal projects.
- Quantization flexibility: With quantized sizes ranging from ~48 GB (FP16) down to ~7.8 GB (Q2_K), the model can fit into a wide range of consumer hardware configurations.
Limitations
- Non-commercial license: The Mistral Research License prohibits commercial deployment, limiting use to research and personal experimentation.
- Large memory footprint at full precision: FP16 requires ~48 GB of storage plus significant overhead for KV cache and framework, necessitating high-end hardware for full-precision inference.
- No community benchmarks available: We do not yet have independent, community-reported performance measurements; published vendor metrics should be treated as best-case.
- Dense parameter count: At 24B parameters, inference compute cost is higher than smaller dense models, though lower than the MoE variant's total parameter count.
What it takes to run this locally
At FP16, the model requires 48 GB of disk space. Quantized versions reduce this significantly: Q8_0 (26 GB), Q6_K (19.8 GB), Q5_K_M (17.1 GB), Q4_K_M (13.5 GB), Q3_K_M (11.7 GB), and Q2_K (~7.8 GB). Add roughly 30–50% for KV cache and framework overhead at typical context lengths. This places the model in the consumer deployment class: a single 24 GB GPU can run Q4_K_M or lower quants, while FP16 requires a workstation with 48 GB or dual 24 GB GPUs.
Should you run this locally?
Yes if you need a dense model with a very long context window for research or non-commercial projects, and you have a consumer GPU with at least 12–16 GB VRAM for quantized inference. No if you require commercial use rights, or if you need the highest possible throughput for production workloads — consider models with permissive licenses instead.
Catalog cross-links
- Mistral AI
- Mistral Medium 3.5 MoE
- Consumer GPU guide
Overview
Dense variant in the Mistral Medium 3.5 family. Research license — non-commercial open. Same training data as the MoE flagship but in a smaller dense package.
Strengths
- Mistral instruction-following at dense 24B
Weaknesses
- Research license blocks commercial use
Quantization variants
Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.
| Quantization | File size | VRAM required |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 14.0 GB | 18 GB |
Get the model
HuggingFace
Original weights
Source repository — direct quantization required.
Hardware that runs this
Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of Mistral Medium 3 24B (dense).
Models worth comparing
Same parameter band, plus what's one tier above and below — so you can decide what actually fits your hardware.
Frequently asked
What's the minimum VRAM to run Mistral Medium 3 24B (dense)?
Can I use Mistral Medium 3 24B (dense) commercially?
What's the context length of Mistral Medium 3 24B (dense)?
Source: huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Medium-3-24B-dense
Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.
Related — keep moving
Verify Mistral Medium 3 24B (dense) runs on your specific hardware before committing money.