MiniMax ships M3.1 Flash, claiming 3x faster inference and 70% lower usage costs

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MiniMax ships M3.1 Flash, claiming 3x faster inference and 70% lower usage costs

MiniMax M3.1 Flash is now officially rolled out, and the company says it makes online inference nearly three times faster while cutting usage costs by 70%.
It scores 61.7 on OSWorld V2 and 29.6 on Agents' Last Exam, ranking first among Chinese models on both, and reaches 76.2 on BankerToolBench.
It hits 73.7% on DeepSWE v1.1, placing it alongside top models, and 82% on CyberGym for vulnerability discovery.
The article says an anonymous earlier version called Space Bunny processed more than 200 trillion tokens before the official launch.
Hacker News commenters say the weights are not yet released, and the MiniMax FAQ lists 428B total parameters with 23B active.

Hacker News opinions

Curious if anyone has put it up against DeepSeek Flash yet. Some reddit folks say it's not as good as DS 4.1 Flash, but I haven't tested it and I don't trust benchmarks much.

The weights aren't out yet. The FAQ says this one is 428B total with 23B active, which is close to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. Calling these 'flash' models is funny when they're not small or fast.

Another Pareto frontier moved up and to the left, but I'd rather see wall clock time. A cheaper model that takes twice as long is hard to justify at work, and releases almost never show time per task.

Someone already pointed out the chart doesn't really show the frontier moving. Any benchmark combo has multiple frontiers, and marketing always picks the one where they look best.

Dupe spam on HN here. The domain was shadowbanned, which is why people kept resubmitting it, and a mod apparently let one through. Minimax is newsworthy enough that dang should unban it.

The DeepSWE scores don't match what opencode users saw from Space Bunny. A lot of them went back to Qwen or DeepSeek v4 Flash after it made dumb mistakes. Also a bunch of models sit at almost exactly 74%, which makes me suspicious.

Cost math: per AA, Opus 5.5 is about 23x more per task than DeepSeek at max effort, but a $20 Claude sub reportedly gives around $1200 in API value. The sub might be the better deal, and it's a stronger model.

The 70% cut is funny given all the cost complaints. Input went from $0.30 to $0.15 per MTok and cache reads halved, which explains it, but DeepSeek V4.1 still beats it on cache pricing.