Less than a year behind the SOTA, faster, and cheaper. I think Mistral is mounting a good recovery. I would not use it yet since it is not the best along any dimension that matters to me (I'm not EU-bound) but it is catching up. I think its closed source competitors are Haiku 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro Fast (TBA) and whatever ridiculously-named light model OpenAI offers today (GPT 5.1 Codex Max Extra High Fast?)
No this is comparable to Deepseek-v3.2 even on their highlight task, with significantly worse general ability. And it's priced 5x of that.
The OpenAI thing is named Garlic.
(Surely they won't release it like that, right..?)