An experimental post-training transfer study. We applied the Vinci SFT + DPO character recipe to mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 to answer one question: does character training developed on a different model lineage transfer to this one? Apache-2.0, 7.25B, drop-in with transformers. This uses a retired base, and we are saying so first. Mistral lists Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 as retired as of 30 March 2025 (deprecated 30 November 2024), with Ministral 3 8B as the recommended replacement. "Retired" is Mistral's own lifecycle term. The open weights remain downloadable on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0. We selected this base for continuity with our earlier experiments, not because it is…


