Head-to-head comparison
Aion-3.0-Mini (Aion Labs) and GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct (OpenAI) compared on the ModelCap Index, API price, context window, provider availability, weight access and every public benchmark board they share. Figures are the same ones shown on the live rankings; nothing here is a hidden score.
Snapshot as of 22 August 2026
As of 22 August 2026, GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct holds the stronger ModelCap Index position (#114 vs #117); Aion-3.0-Mini is 1.4× cheaper per output token ($1.40/1M vs $2.00/1M); and Aion-3.0-Mini offers the longer context window (131K vs 4K tokens).
Evidence: global corpus prior · leave-one-anchor-out calibrated · publisher corpus prior · leave-one-anchor-out calibrated. Prices are the lowest listed API offer per million tokens observed on the OpenRouter catalogue.
Neither model has a published result on a public benchmark board ModelCap tracks yet.
Scores are the sources' own published figures for each model's best evaluated configuration; ModelCap never re-runs a benchmark.
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GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct ranks higher on the ModelCap Index as of 22 August 2026: #114 against #117. That is a capability ranking built from public benchmark evidence with published uncertainty; whether it is "better" for you also depends on price, context and where you can run it.
Aion-3.0-Mini is cheaper on output tokens: $1.40/1M against $2.00/1M. Input tokens are $0.70/1M for Aion-3.0-Mini and $1.50/1M for GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct. Prices are the lowest listed API offer ModelCap observed, in USD per million tokens.
Aion-3.0-Mini has the larger context window: 131K tokens against 4K.
The two models do not share a coding benchmark board on ModelCap yet, so no head-to-head coding score is published; the ModelCap Index position is the closest overall signal.
Aion-3.0-Mini: API only. GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct: API only. Open weights mean the checkpoint can be downloaded and self-hosted under its licence; API-only models are available solely through hosted endpoints.
ModelCap currently lists 1 API provider for Aion-3.0-Mini and 1 for GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct, from the OpenRouter catalogue snapshot the site serves; each model page lists the providers and their prices.
Every figure comes from the sealed ModelCap dataset published 22 August 2026; the page re-renders within a minute of each data refresh, and the ModelCap Index positions are the same ones shown on the live rankings.