In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- Both can be downloaded and run on your own machine.
- No independent board we follow ranks both models yet.
Side by side
The specs.
| DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | MiniMax-M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | DeepSeek · China | MiniMax · China |
| Released | Oct 17, 2026 | Not stated |
| Price per 1M tokens | $0.30 in / $1.20 out (peak-hours price) | $0.30 in / $1.20 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text |
| Download and run it yourself | Yes (MIT) | Yes (minimax-community (license tag shown on Hugging Face)) |
| Size | 552B backbone parameters parameters, 8B per token during prefill, 16B during decode active | ~428B parameters, ~23B active |
| Maker says | “Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version.” | “MiniMax-M3 is a native multimodal model with 1M context.” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
More comparisons