MiniMax releases M3.1 Flash with stronger reasoning and lower task costs

What happened

MiniMax released M3.1 Flash, a reasoning model scoring 42 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, up from M3’s 29, at less than half the cost per task. It supports text and images with up to one million tokens of context; API pricing is $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. Artificial Analysis reports a 93 percent hallucination rate because it answers rather than declines uncertain questions; open weights are planned for October 23.

The story so far

MiniMax released MiniMax-M3.1-Flash through its API, and Artificial Analysis reported that the model scored 42 on its Intelligence Index at maximum effort, up from MiniMax-M3’s 29, while costing less than half as much per Index task. Artificial Analysis estimated task costs at approximately $0.22 versus $0.51 for M3. The score tied GLM-5.3-Flash and trailed DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, which scored 45. The model supports text and image inputs with up to one million tokens of context. API pricing is $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. Its weights are currently closed; MiniMax plans to release open weights on October 23. Artificial Analysis also found a weakness in its AA-Omniscience evaluation: MiniMax-M3.1-Flash answered 56% of questions correctly but attempted almost every question, producing a reported hallucination rate of 93% and an overall score of 16.

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