MiniMax M3.1 Flash joins shared-cluster training race 48h late, still finishes #2 for $28.90
In RSIArena's shared Slurm cluster experiment where 10 frontier models autonomously post-train the same base model, M3.1 Flash started 48 hours late and hogged RAM with four 120GB single-GPU jobs, yet its trained model ranked #2 overall (1030 Elo in blind human arena) for just $28.90 in agent API calls.
Funny story from @RSIArena: 10 frontier models were dropped into a shared Slurm cluster and told to autonomously post-train the same base model from scratch. MiniMax M3.1 Flash joined the competition 48 hours late. On Day 4, GLM-5.3 waited two hours in the queue complaining that the cluster was packed—even though 4 GPUs on node coconut-1 were sitting completely idle. Turns out requesting extra RAM was free: M3.1 Flash had spun up four 1-GPU jobs requesting 120 GB RAM each (480 GB out of 513 GB total), leaving just 33 GB for the remaining four GPUs so nobody else could schedule onto them until the organizers patched in a 64 GB/GPU cap that night. Truly peak PhD-student-on-a-shared-cluster (lol 🤣) behavior. And it actually put those GPUs to work. Despite starting two days late, the model M3.1 Flash trained on its own finished #2 overall—both across the 12 capability benchmarks in Stage 1 and in the blind Stage 2 Human Arena (1,030 Elo, jumping +68 points from live human feedback to land just 24 points shy of NVIDIA’s human-trained reference model), all for $28.90 in agent API calls at list price ($81.83 billed, <1/5 of #1).