In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- MiniMax-M3 is cheaper per output token: $1.20 against $2.50 per million tokens, so Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite costs 2.1 times as much.
- Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite reads more at once: a context window of 1M tokens against 1M.
- MiniMax-M3 can be downloaded and run on your own machine; Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite can't.
- No independent board we follow ranks both models yet.
Side by side
The specs.
| Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite | MiniMax-M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Google · US | MiniMax · China |
| Released | Jul 21, 2026 | Not stated |
| Price per 1M tokens | $0.30 in / $2.50 out | $0.30 in / $1.20 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image, video, audio, pdf | text |
| Download and run it yourself | No | Yes (minimax-community (license tag shown on Hugging Face)) |
| Size | Not published | ~428B parameters, ~23B active |
| Maker says | “Our fastest, most cost-effective 3.5 model for high-throughput execution.” | “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.
| Board | Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite | MiniMax-M3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond (run by Vals AI, archived)Vals AI, Sep 1, 2026 | Not listed | #15 |
More comparisons