Simon Willison’s Weblog

Mistral Small 3.1 on Ollama. Mistral Small 3.1 (previously) is now available through Ollama, providing an easy way to run this multi-modal (vision) model on a Mac (and other platforms, though I haven't tried those myself).

I had to upgrade Ollama to the most recent version to get it to work - prior to that I got a Error: unable to load model message. Upgrades can be accessed through the Ollama macOS system tray icon.

I fetched the 15GB model by running:

ollama pull mistral-small3.1

Then used llm-ollama to run prompts through it, including one to describe this image:

llm install llm-ollama
llm -m mistral-small3.1 'describe this image' -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/Mpaboundrycdfw-1.png

Here's the output. It's good, though not quite as impressive as the description I got from the slightly larger Qwen2.5-VL-32B.

I also tried it on a scanned (private) PDF of hand-written text with very good results, though it did misread one of the hand-written numbers.