Chinese AI startup MiniMax unveiled its advanced M3 large language model, boasting cutting-edge coding and agentic abilities with a remarkable 1-million-token context window and native multimodality. Offered at subscription prices starting from $20 per month, MiniMax-M3 outperforms leading U.S. proprietary models like GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on key benchmarks, while costing only 5-10% as much. The company plans to release the model under an open-source license with open weights, enabling enterprises to download, customize, and run it locally free of charge within days. The core innovation, MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), drastically reduces computational costs by intelligently filtering attention blocks, resulting in up to 15x faster processing compared to alternatives.
This model excels in autonomous software engineering, scoring 59.0% on SWE-Bench Pro, surpassing many competitors. MiniMax-M3 supports efficient multi-agent coding workflows in its MiniMax Code AI agent, allowing complex tasks to be executed autonomously for extended periods. With flexible subscription tiers catering to different usage levels, MiniMax-M3 offers enterprises full control, enhanced privacy, and cost savings by avoiding cloud API dependency. Early community feedback highlights its strong long-horizon reasoning and highly competitive cost-performance ratio. MiniMax’s open-weights approach reshapes the balance of power in enterprise AI, making frontier-level capabilities accessible with full local control and no vendor lock-in.
