MiniMax M3
Open-weight multimodal model with native video input and 1M context.
- Context window
- 1.0Mtokens
- Max output
- 66Ktokens
- Input price
- $0.30/ 1M tokens
- Output price
- $1.20/ 1M tokens
- Cached input
- $0.06/ 1M tokens
- Modalities
- Text, Image, Video
- Knowledge cutoff
- Jan 2026
- Released
- Jun 2026
- Parameters
- 428B
- License
- MiniMax Community License
- Approx. speed
- —
What this model is
MiniMax M3 is MiniMax's current flagship, an open-weight (MiniMax Community License) ~428B MoE (≈23B active) multimodal system with sparse/lightning attention giving cheap 1M-token context and rare native video input. It offers excellent value and strong long-context and multimodal breadth, with respectable coding, but does not match the Claude/GPT frontier for sustained autonomous agentic coding. A standout choice when video understanding, long context, and open licensing matter.
Strengths
- Native video input (rare among LLMs)
- Cheap 1M-token context via sparse attention
- Open weights (MiniMax Community License)
- Strong long-context and multimodal breadth
Trade-offs
- Agentic coding reliability below the frontier
- English writing slightly behind top labs
- Smaller tooling ecosystem in the West
- Vision/video quality trails dedicated multimodal flagships
Best for
- Video and multimodal understanding
- Cheap long-context processing
- Self-hosted open deployments
- High-volume multilingual tasks
Not ideal for
- Long autonomous coding agents
- Mission-critical frontier reasoning
Capability profile
Normalized 0–100 scores, comparable across the whole catalog.
- Reasoning
- 78
- Coding
- 70
- Math
- 72
- Writing
- 74
- Knowledge
- 80
- Speed
- 76
- Agentic
- 68
- Vision
- 72
- Multilingual
- 78
- Long Context
- 88
How it scores
Public benchmark results, with independent third-party results where available. Bars normalize percentages to 100 and Elo ratings to a 1500 ceiling.