MiniMax Releases M3.1 Flash at $0.15/$0.60; Artificial Analysis Scores It 42, With Weights Promised for Oct. 23
MiniMax released M3.1 Flash on Oct. 19 at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens and says an early version ran anonymously as Space Bunny. Artificial Analysis scores it about 42 on its Intelligence Index and reports a 93% hallucination rate on AA-Omniscience. Weights are promised for Oct. 23; they are not open yet. Other benches are MiniMax's.
Another cheap Chinese agent-focused model landed two days after DeepSeek's Flash update — and this one is not open weights yet. MiniMax on Monday, October 19 released M3.1 Flash, which it says delivers nearly 3x faster online inference and 70% lower agentic usage cost than its predecessor. List price is $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 per million output and $0.015 cached input, served at 200+ tokens per second (P50 170+), MiniMax says. An early version ran anonymously as "Space Bunny" and processed more than 200 trillion tokens, according to the company.
Independent score
Artificial Analysis scores M3.1 Flash about 42 on its Intelligence Index (42.71 in the payload we parsed), up from 29 for MiniMax M3, VentureBeat reports, with cost per task down from about $0.51 to $0.22. AA's isOpenWeights flag is false. On AA-Omniscience, VentureBeat says the model was 56% correct with a 93% hallucination rate under AA's definition, for an Omniscience score of 16.
MiniMax's own benches
MiniMax reports 76.2 on BankerToolBench, 73.7% on DeepSWE v1.1, 61.7 on OSWorld V2 and 82% on CyberGym. Those figures are the company's. The model is available now through the MiniMax API, M Plan and MiniMax Code. "Model weights will be released later," the blog says; VentureBeat reports MiniMax plans to publish them on October 23, with licence terms not yet given.
Limits
- Every benchmark except Artificial Analysis is MiniMax self-reported. Weights and licence for October 23 are promises, not a release.