Research
Mistral Small: 58 empty replies in 300 tool calls, and the retry loop
The Brief
- In 300 public function-calling tasks, Mistral Small (2603) returned an empty reply 58 times, even after two retries.
- That is 19.3% of tasks with nothing to parse.
- The article focuses on the retry loop needed to handle these empty replies.
Why it matters
If you use Mistral Small for tool calls, a meaningful share of responses may be empty, so your code needs to handle empty replies and retries affect your cost per successful task.
Who’s affected
- Developers using Mistral Small for function calling
- Mistral Small 2603
- #mistral
- #llm
- #function-calling
- #benchmark
- #tool-use
On 300 public function-calling tasks, Mistral Small (2603) returned an empty reply 58 times, even after two retries. That is 19.3% of tasks with nothing to parse, and it is why a model priced at $0.15 per million input tokens ended up at $0.000098 per successful task against…