Model launches
MiniMax M3: a powerful new AI you might soon run yourself — explained
A cheap, capable model from China — and the catch about whether you can actually download it.
MiniMax M3 (1 June 2026) is a low-cost AI model strong at coding, with a huge memory.
China's AI labs keep shipping capable models for a fraction of the usual price, and MiniMax M3 is the latest. Here's what it is and whether it's worth your attention.
What makes it interesting
Three things: it's strong at coding, it can take in about a million tokens at once (think entire codebases or very long documents), and it understands images and video, not just text. And it's priced at roughly a tenth of what the big US models charge — the kind of gap that matters if you're building something that runs a lot.
The two catches
First, despite the 'open-weight' label, you couldn't download it at launch — MiniMax said the files would appear on the model-sharing site Hugging Face within about ten days. Second, the headline scores (like beating GPT-5.5 on a coding test) came from MiniMax's own testing, which nobody outside could double-check yet.
Sources
- MiniMax M3 Open-Weight Coding Model: Frontier Claims, Unverified Benchmarks — Tech Times, 1 June 2026
- MiniMax launches M3, an open-weight frontier model with 1M context — DataNorth, 1 June 2026
- What Is MiniMax M3? The First Open-Weight Frontier Coding Model — Apidog, 2 June 2026