MiniMax: MiniMax M1
MiniMax M1 offers a very large 1M token context window and supports tool use and function calling at a reasonable price, but the absence of any benchmark data makes it impossible to verify its real-world performance. Businesses requiring proven capability should look elsewhere until evaluation data is published.
Assessment date: March 14, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
MiniMax-M1 is a large-scale, open-weight reasoning model designed for extended context and high-efficiency inference. It leverages a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture paired with a custom "lightning attention" mechanism, allowing it to process long sequences—up to 1 million tokens—while maintaining competitive FLOP efficiency. With 456 billion total parameters and 45.9B active per token, this variant is optimized for complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. Trained via a custom reinforcement learning pipeline (CISPO), M1 excels in long-context understanding, software engineering, agentic tool use, and mathematical reasoning. Benchmarks show strong performance across FullStackBench, SWE-bench, MATH, GPQA, and TAU-Bench, often outperforming other open models like DeepSeek R1 and Qwen3-235B.
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text → Text |
| Tokenizer | Other |
Model Information
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.40 | $0.000400 |
| Output | $2.20 | $0.002200 |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
External Resources
Data sourced from OpenRouter API, Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Scores are editorially curated by our team.
Last updated: March 15, 2026 7:52 pm