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

The author recommends M3.1 Flash for boring background agent jobs but not near production code without checking, citing $0.15 input, $0.60 output and $0.015 cached input per 1M tokens.

The author says MiniMax M3.1 Flash is one of the harder models to abliterate, noting there are no abliterated releases on Hugging Face while other models have many.

A short complaint says Kimi K3.1 Pro, MiniMax M3.1 Flash, Muse wonder and Gemini 4 Argon all flopped, leaving only DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 in use, without any concrete failure details.

A user reports the same task consumed 30% of a 5-hour quota on GPT-6.1 Sol but exhausted three full 5-hour quotas on MiniMax M3.1 Flash.

An OpenCode daily usage chart shows DeepSeek 4.1 Flash surging since 1017, MiniMax M3.1 Flash dropping into the others bucket after its free promo ended, and GLM 5.3 Flash a distant second.

A developer says DeepSeek V4.1 Flash produces vulnerable code in critical areas like authentication, GLM-5.3 finds flaws but writes insecure code, and Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol and MiniMax M3.1 Flash clearly do better there.

The author ran a computer/browser-use benchmark in Runable and found MiniMax M3.1 Flash scored exactly the same as the Anthropic model — which even failed one task — yet the tool still ranked Anthropic higher, raising bias concerns.

Across 13 OpenRouter endpoints, the 7 reporting exactly 205 input tokens mentioned Claude in 46% of replies versus 0.8% for the other 6; the 205 matches MiniMax's official chat template, mentions hit 90% at temperature 0, and FP4 quantization doesn't explain it, pointing to serving configuration.

After two weeks of free Space Bunny use in OpenCode for simple tasks, the author learned from MiniMax's blog that it was an early M3.1 Flash that processed over 200 trillion tokens anonymously; open weights are 428B total with 23B active per token.

The author notes almost no one talks about MiniMax M3.1 Flash, guessing its plain MoE design leaves its accuracy-speed balance looking average next to Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017.

After open-sourcing, M3.1 Flash costs about $0.22 per task versus several dollars for Claude and over three for GPT-6, but the author claims a 93% hallucination rate and fabrication instead of admitting ignorance.

A user says signing up on MiniMax's site and installing MiniMax Code yields 400 credits per day, and M3.1 Flash with 1M context and the harness works great.