MiniMax M3.1 Flash in practice: tests and comparisons with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

A single prompt had M3.1 Flash generate a live, interactive 3D street-corner store on a rainy night running in the browser, demoed on SandBase Lab.

The author says after trying both, M3.1 Flash is not better than the previous model on SWE tasks despite higher reported scores, accusing MiniMax of benchmaxxing.

A Japanese post covers M3.1 Flash as the official Space Bunny, 3x faster at one-third cost, API at $0.15 per million input tokens, 74% on DeepSWE, weights due Oct 23.

Hands-on impression: MiniMax M3.1 Flash's free tier is very fast, while Command Code's V4.1 Flash fast is also quick but costs a bit more once performance and comfort are factored in; M3.1 Flash is priced the same as V4.1 Flash's off-peak rate.

Anonymous Space Bunny led OpenRouter for ten days with 56.7T tokens processed; MiniMax confirmed it as an early M3.1 Flash and reported stealth-period gains: 38% lower time to first token, 70→100 tok/s, halved error rate, plus vendor benchmarks and a 72-hour free window.

On an identical sliceable-jelly-toy prompt, M3.1 Flash ran ~50 commands, rewrote the physics engine unprompted, then failed on insufficient balance with zero output, while Opus 5.5 delivered a working toy.

MiniMax reports 74% on DeepSWE and 62% on Automation-Bench; API is $0.15 input / $0.60 output / $0.015 cached input per million tokens, with weights scheduled for October 23.

Same-prompt Eiffel Tower scene: MiniMax M3.1 Flash cost $0.24 in 1h 00m 44s versus $0.53 and 1h 10m 31s for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, with richer surroundings at less than half the price.

A max-effort comparison: M3.1 Flash on OpenCode took 4h01m, 147.9M tokens and $2.68, while DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 took 1h57m, 134.7M tokens and $0.72.

The post compares two Chinese Flash models: M3.1 Flash at ¥1 input / ¥4 output per million tokens versus DeepSeek 1017 at ¥0.02 cached and ¥1 uncached input off-peak, with DeepSeek scoring higher on software engineering benchmarks.

MiniMax says M3.1 Flash is built for long agentic coding runs where costs add up fast, and it is available free in Cline from launch day.

MiniMax confirms Space Bunny was an early build of M3.1 Flash that held OpenRouter's top usage spot for 10 straight days, and the final version is now live and free for 72 hours.