MiniMax Releases M3.1 Flash: 1M Context Window, $0.15/M Token Pricing, Surging +106 Points in WebDev Code Arena

Background and the Problem

In autonomous coding agents and long-context reasoning pipelines, engineers constantly face a harsh tradeoff between frontier intelligence and prohibitive latency/token costs. Complex workflows on benchmarks like SWE-bench or multi-turn web application prototyping routinely execute dozens of iterative inference passes. High token tariffs and prolonged time-to-first-token (TTFT) from closed-source commercial APIs constrain production deployments. The mystery model "Space Bunny", which accumulated over 200 trillion tokens across public evaluation arenas, has been officially unveiled by MiniMax as MiniMax M3.1 Flash.

Architecture and How It Works

1. Native 1M Context Window with Unmatched Token Economics:

• Supports up to 1,000,000 tokens of native context for both text and high-resolution visual inputs;
• Drastically resets agent operational economics: API pricing is set at $0.15 / 1M input tokens and $0.60 / 1M output tokens, with cache reads priced at an ultra-low $0.015 / 1M tokens;
• Yields 3x faster inference throughput compared to MiniMax-M3 while cutting overall execution costs by two-thirds;

1. Space Bunny Proven Lineage and Open-Weights Timeline:

• Confirmed as the refined production release of "Space Bunny", battle-tested across hundreds of thousands of blind arena battles;
• MiniMax committed to releasing the open model weights on October 23, providing the open-source community with a flagship 1M-context model with top-tier code synthesis capabilities.

Benchmarks and Measured Results

Synthesizing official benchmarks, LMSYS Code Arena, and independent Artificial Analysis evaluations:

• Core Agent Capabilities (Official Disclosures):
• Cowork: Achieves 62% on Automation-Bench and 30% on ALE;
• Coding: Reaches 74% on DeepSWE;
• Visual Reasoning: Scores 91% on BabyVision;
• LMSYS Code Arena: WebDev Blind Evaluation:
• Debuts at 1588 Elo points, securing #12 among all open models (#32 overall) and propelling MiniMax to the top 12 AI research labs worldwide;
• Represents a massive +106 point increase over MiniMax-M3 (1482 points, #19 open);
• Marked sub-category jumps include Gaming jumping from #21 to #9 (+179 pts), Reference-Based Design from #20 to #7 (+155 pts), Simulations to #13 (+122 pts), and Content Creation Tools to #7 (+113 pts);
• Artificial Analysis Independent Verification:
• Intelligence Index (Max Effort): Scores 42 (+13 over M3), matching GLM-5.3-Flash (42), beating Gemini 3.8 Flash (41), and trailing DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (45);
• Humanity's Last Exam (HLE): Achieves 48% (surpassing GLM's 40% and DeepSeek's 43%);
• CritPt: Scores 22% (vs MiniMax-M3's 4% and GLM's 15%);
• Token & Cost Efficiency: Consumes only ~189M tokens across the full Index benchmark (roughly half of Gemini's 334M and GLM's 324M), delivering an industry-leading task cost of $0.22 (compared to $1.24 for Gemini and $0.51 for M3).

Getting Started for Developers

• API Availability: Developers can obtain API keys at platform.minimax.io, supporting seamless drop-in compatibility with the OpenAI SDK specification;
• Desktop Agent Integration: MiniMax released MiniMax Code (agent.minimax.io/download), a standalone desktop development assistant powered by M3.1 Flash;
• Open Weights Release: Open weights will arrive on October 23 via Hugging Face for self-hosted deployments seeking low-latency agent infrastructure.