Well in some things it totally can be to some extent, yes. You can almost certainly get a Mistral 7B fine tuned for a specific thing (e.g. coding) and it will l

Well in some things it totally can be to some extent, yes. You can almost certainly get a Mistral 7B fine tuned for a specific thing (e.g. coding) and it will likely be about as good as 3.5 in that specific thing (not a super high bar in objective terms). For all the other areas it may suffer in performance relative to its original self, but for some applications that's fine. As for GPT-4 it's about 120 ELO points [0] above Mixtral, and that's even the distilled turbo version. Not even close imo, especially when Mixtral is far less censored. Both 3.5 and 4 have changed drastically over the past year with continued fine tuning, quantization, etc. so what some people consider their level is not exactly a fixed point either. [0] The actual leaderboard I'm referencing, it has its biases but it's the most generally indicative thing available right now: https://chat.lmsys.org https://chat.lmsys.org