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

The stealth model held #1 on OpenRouter's coding board for ten days and burned 56.7T tokens; it is MiniMax M3.1 Flash at a third of M3's cost, 3x faster, $0.15/M input, 70% cheaper per task, weights on Oct 23.

On the updated Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, M3.1 Flash scores 42, MiniMax's best yet, level with GLM-5.3-Flash and 2 points behind Kimi K3; it beats the September DeepSeek V4.1 Flash but trails the current 1017 version.

A zero-shot, single-turn, no-harness comparison where the author calls DeepSeek Flash a monster with better prompt adherence and camera-shot nuance, while M3.1 Flash threw a console error that needed fixing.

A ranking of OpenCode's limited-time free models puts Space Bunny (M3.1 Flash) first on reasoning at ~75 and usage, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash strongest on coding at ~67.5 and LongCat 2.5 Preview balanced across both.

The author previously built a playable 3D game with the anonymized Space Bunny and enjoyed it; he relays official claims of 3x M3's speed at one-third the cost and highlights Automation-Bench at 62.2 versus Claude Opus 5's 50.3.

Asked to generate 100 non-repetitive HTML pages, MiniMax M3.1 Flash produced decent but weaker output than DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3 Flash, with some broken files and rendering issues; results shared unedited.

Pricing is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens with weights due Oct 23; the tool-use docs warn that simple tool-call turns may return no reasoning_content field, so agent loops must handle its absence.

A commenter argues the blind reveal is the best review a model can get, since Space Bunny's output competed with Opus 5 when nobody knew the brand behind it.

The author calls M3.1 Flash essentially an upgraded Space Bunny, saying its 74% DeepSWE score makes real agent coding workflows more reliable and that it runs 3x faster than M3.

The author ran the same prompt through Space Bunny and Gemini 3.8 Flash to build a full 3D scene, saying Space Bunny was fast, and notes the full M3.1 Flash adds coding/agent gains and up to 70% lower agentic-task cost, with detailed tests still to come.

The author shows a decision flow generated by MiniMax M3.1 Flash and plans to compare it with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on clinical tasks; only the flow image is shared so far.

The author plans three uses for M3.1 Flash: a 30-step scraping executor, first-pass PR review and overnight research runs, citing 76.2 BankerToolBench, 73.7 DeepSWE and 170+ tok/s.