MiniMax released M3.1 Flash on Monday, saying it cuts agent costs by 70 percent. Per-token prices fell by half, which accounts for part of that claim. The rest depends on how many tokens an agent spends to finish a job, and MiniMax hasn’t said how it measured that.

The company lists $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 per million output tokens and $0.015 per million cached input tokens, and claims inference nearly three times faster than its predecessor, M3. That 70 percent figure is the one to test; a cheaper rate card only helps if the agent also finishes in fewer loops.

That 70 percent figure is the one to test; a cheaper rate card only helps if the agent also finishes in fewer loops.

A study of token consumption in agentic coding tasks found that repeated runs of the same task can use up to 30 times as many tokens, with input tokens accounting for most of the usage, which makes MiniMax’s 70 percent savings claim difficult to assess without knowing which workloads it tested.

Artificial Analysis provides an independent comparison. In its announcement, the firm puts the average cost per Intelligence Index task at $0.22 for M3.1 Flash, down from $0.51 for M3, a 57 percent reduction. That’s below MiniMax’s claimed 70 percent savings, though the two figures come from different workloads.

The coding scores barely separate. 6 Sol at 73. 1 Flash 1017 at 77 in the same table. 5 isn’t in that table, so if you’re benchmarking against the current Opus, run your own evals.

Source link