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

The two Chinese Flash models land on identical $0.15/$0.60 pricing and near-identical coding scores of 74.2% vs 74%.

Recap of the stealth model's run: free on OpenRouter from Sep 23, top daily token rankings in three days, AAI intelligence 42 vs DeepSeek's 45, $0.22 vs $0.26 per task.

Same list price (¥1 input / ¥4 output), but DeepSeek doubles on weekday daytime while MiniMax stays flat; the author suggests MiniMax for daytime agents and DeepSeek at night.

A user says M3.1 Flash Preview felt identical to Space Bunny and is now confirmed to be the same model, calling the coding experience great.

SandBase runs one Pelican prompt across MiniMax M3.1 Flash, Kimi K3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3, with video of the results.

Official numbers put Automation-Bench at 62.2 vs Opus 5's 50.3, while OSWorld and Terminal Bench still trail; API is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens with weights due Oct 23, and Space Bunny is confirmed as an earlier version.

Using identical prompts and thinking levels, the poster says each model has its own style but DeepSeek V4.1-1017 Flash is clearly a tier above MiniMax M3.1 Flash.

A post argues MiniMax M3.1 Flash outperforms Opus 5 at $0.60 per million tokens, framing it against Dario's remarks on distillation.

The author says M3.1 Flash's launch, even with free access on OpenCode and OpenRouter, sparked far less discussion than DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017's minor update, and notes Space Bunny once topped token-usage charts.

Space Bunny is confirmed as an early MiniMax M3.1 Flash, which topped OpenRouter for 10 days; $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens, 200+ tok/s, 3x faster than M3, open weights on Oct 23.

The author cites M3.1 Flash at $0.15/$0.60 with $0.015 cached input per million tokens and a claimed 70% agent cost cut, but wants to measure what a full read-code-fix loop actually costs.

On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, M3.1 Flash beats Gemini 3.8 Flash and Muse Spark Open, matches GLM 5.3 Flash, and trails Claude 5.5 Haiku by 1 point and Kimi K3 by 2.