MiniMax M3.1 Flash - Hacker News

Posted by jtg 5 hours ago

MiniMax M3.1 Flash(www.minimax.io)

301 points | 125 commentspage 2

swiftcoder 4 hours ago|

Curious if anyone has put it up against DeepSeek Flash yet, see if the price/performance benchmarks hold up?

bel8 4 hours ago|

Some reddit comments say it's not as good as DS 4.1 Flash. But I didn't test myself and I don't trust benchmarks.

johnnyApplePRNG 1 hour ago||

Is DHS going to blacklist this one, too? [0]

DHS now plays AI whack a mole, apparently.

[0] https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-21447.pdf

walrus01 4 hours ago||

The deepswe and terminalbench4.0 scores don't seem to jive with what many opencode users' experience has been of this model while it was being tested as "space bunny". I saw a lot of anecdotes of people trying it and going back to qwen 3.8-flash-next or deepseek v4 flash because "space bunny" made some rather egregious errors.

penagwin 3 hours ago|

> [Space Bunny] was an early version of MiniMax M3.1 Flash.

They mention that space bunny was an earlier checkpoints, so it may have improved (or may it could be benchmaxxed)

I find it interesting that so many models seem to be at almost exactly 74% specifically which makes me suspicious of the benchmark. I want to say 5.6-sol, Astra, deepseek flash 4.1, opus 5 (and 5.5?), Gemini 3.8-flash and a few others all ended up there?

jakswa 1 hour ago||

> so many models seem to be at almost exactly 74%

There was talk of deepswe tests being flawed. I have yet to find a better gauge of useful work for my case though, so I still keep referencing it and sampling it. On the lookout for improved benchmarks.

"We found issues in at least 23 out of 113 tasks (over 20.3%), leading us to designate the benchmark as Flawed." - https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/deepswe/review

penagwin 1 hour ago||

I do agree that it’s generally matched my impressions of models for general SWE at least until we had Opus 5 and 5.6-Sol beating Fable 5. Which coincidentally is when they hit 74%.

Models like Deepseek 4.1 flash, Muse 1.3, and MiniMax 3.1 flash are certainly capable and very cost effective, but I’m not sure anyone would say they’re better than Fable 5/5.1 in capability

lisplist 3 hours ago||

MiniMax models have been pretty disappointing. M2.5 was good, M2.7 was meh and came with a terrible license, 3 meh. Maybe this will be better, but I have my doubts. When I say good vs meh vs bad, this is all relative of course. If M3.1 came out a few months ago it would be groundbreaking. Things just move too quick.

H3, on the other hand, is phenomenal

varispeed 3 hours ago||

The comparisons with models like GPT-5.6 or Opus are pointless because they vary substantially. They are often nerfed shortly after release and then performance is not consistent. One day model will be doing relatively fine, another it will be dumb as markov generator. In that regard self hosted models are better, because you know what is running your requests.

andriy_koval 2 hours ago||

there are some efforts to track it: https://github.com/ninjahawk/livenerf

redanddead 3 hours ago||

This is thought to be conspiracy thinking but I don’t think it is

sam0x17 2 hours ago||

1. Make a new model

2. Add "Flash" to the end

3. ?

4. Profit

johnnyApplePRNG 4 hours ago||

Not as strong as DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on deepswe so it's already dead to me.

Unless they come in at half the price (which I think will be impossible) on inference ... they have wasted their training compute imho.

kingstnap 3 hours ago|

[dead]

simonw 2 hours ago||

Pelicans are pretty solid: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Reasoning traces use truncated English:

> We need provide SVG code. Need creative. Ensure valid standalone. Pelican on bicycle, perhaps detailed vector. Need answer likely fenced svg. Could include title desc. Need be reasonably concise but image quality.

dang 3 hours ago||

Recent and related:

Ask HN: Any guesses on which model/provider is Space Bunny Alpha on OpenRouter? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49898971 - Sept 2026 (1 comment)