MiniMax M3.1 Flash shows China's AI price race has no floor in sight

MiniMax released M3.1 Flash, a reasoning model that scores 42 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — 13 points above its predecessor M3 at less than half the cost per task — and prices API access at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. M3.1 Flash ties GLM-5.3-Flash, edges Gemini 3.8 Flash (41) and trails Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 (45), while leading on Humanity's Last Exam at 48 percent and AA-Omniscience factual accuracy at 56 percent; Artificial Analysis notes a 93 percent hallucination rate because the model answers every test question rather than declining when uncertain. MiniMax says the model runs three times faster than M3, handles up to one million tokens of context with text and images, and will be released as open weights on October 23, with the API already live at platform.minimax.io.

MiniMax M3.1 Flash shows China's AI price race has no floor in sight How cheap can AI output get? China: Yes MiniMax has released M3.1 Flash, a new reasoning model that scores 42 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/minimax-m3-1-flash . That's 13 points higher than its predecessor M3, at less than half the cost per task. The model ties with GLM-5.3-Flash, edges past Gemini 3.8 Flash 41 , and trails Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 45 . Complex reasoning saw the biggest improvement. On "Humanity's Last Exam," M3.1 Flash hits 48 percent, beating both Deepseek and GLM. It also scores 22 percent on the CritPt benchmark https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/critpt , which tests research-level physics reasoning across 71 complex problems. That puts it ahead of GLM-5.3-Flash 15 percent and Gemini 3.8 Flash 18 percent , and just behind Deepseek 24 percent . For factual accuracy on the AA-Omniscience test, M3.1 Flash answers 56 percent of questions correctly, well above GLM-5.3-Flash 28 percent and Deepseek 43 percent . The model also uses far fewer output tokens than its rivals, bringing the cost per task down to about $0.22. MiniMax says it runs three times faster than M3. One weak spot is its 93 percent hallucination rate, since the model tries to answer every test question instead of declining when it's uncertain, according to Artificial Analysis. The model handles up to one million tokens of context and accepts both text and images. API pricing sits at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cached inputs at $0.015. MiniMax plans to release the model as open weights on October 23. The API is live at platform.minimax.io https://platform.minimax.io/ , and MiniMax also offers a desktop app called MiniMax Code https://agent.minimax.io/download . Deepseek and MiniMax split results in China's latest pricing battle Compared head-to-head with the recently released Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 https://the-decoder.com/deepseek-v4-1-flash-1017-beats-larger-rivals-in-agentic-tasks-while-once-again-massively-cutting-per-task-costs/ , neither model wins across the board. Deepseek leads on the Intelligence Index with 45 points versus MiniMax's 42 and has a slight edge on the CritPt benchmark at 24 percent versus 22 percent. MiniMax pulls ahead on other tests. It hits 48 percent on "Humanity's Last Exam," while Deepseek manages 43 percent. For factual accuracy on the AA-Omniscience test, MiniMax answers 56 percent of questions correctly versus Deepseek's 43 percent. MiniMax is also slightly cheaper per task at $0.22 compared to Deepseek's $0.26, since it needs fewer output tokens across the benchmark, about 189 million versus 224 million for Deepseek. Both models are getting open-weight releases. Deepseek is already on Hugging Face https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 , and MiniMax will follow on October 23. AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now Artificial Analysis https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/minimax-m3-1-flash | Minimax https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m31f