MiniMax Releases M3.1 Flash, Reveals 'Space Bunny' Identity
MiniMax confirmed that 'Space Bunny,' the anonymous model that recently topped global leaderboards, was an early version of its newly announced M3.1 Flash LLM. The company claims the new model offers one-third the cost and triple the speed of its previous flagship, with open weights scheduled for release on October 23, though parameter counts and licensing details remain undisclosed.
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Chinese AI company MiniMax announced 'MiniMax M3.1 Flash,' a large language model designed for coding and agentic tasks, on October 19. The company revealed that 'Space Bunny,' an anonymous model that had garnered attention by topping global leaderboards, was actually an earlier version of M3.1 Flash. According to MiniMax's official X account and reporting by Japanese tech outlet Impress Watch, Space Bunny processed over 200 trillion tokens while maintaining its anonymity.
MiniMax claims M3.1 Flash achieves frontier-level performance across key tasks: scoring 62.2% on Automation-Bench v1.0.6 (measuring business automation capability), ranking first among seven compared models; 73.7% on DeepSWE v1.1 (code correction accuracy); and 91.0% on BabyVision (visual reasoning with tool use). These benchmark results were self-run and published by MiniMax and have not yet been independently verified.
Regarding performance economics, MiniMax states that M3.1 Flash costs one-third of what its previous upper-tier model 'MiniMax M3' (launched in June) costs, while operating at three times the speed. API pricing is set at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cache reads at $0.015 per million tokens. The model supports multimodal inputs and features a 1-million-token context window.
MiniMax has previewed that model weights will be made public on October 23, a crucial detail for developers interested in local deployment or assessing actual execution capabilities. However, as of October 19, the specific parameter count and applicable license terms have not been disclosed. For reference, the previous generation MiniMax M3 weights were released under the 'MiniMax Community License,' allowing free non-commercial use and commercial use for companies with annual revenue below $20 million provided they register and display 'Built with MiniMax M3.' Whether M3.1 Flash will follow similar permissive terms will be clarified upon the official release on October 23.