[HN Gopher] MiniMax M2.1: Built for Real-World Complex Tasks, Mu...
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MiniMax M2.1: Built for Real-World Complex Tasks, Multi-Language
Programming
Author : 110
Score : 205 points
Date : 2025-12-26 01:02 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minimaxi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minimaxi.com)
| p-e-w wrote:
| One of the cited reviews goes:
|
| "We're excited for powerful open-source models like M2.1 [...]"
|
| Yet as far as I can tell, this model isn't open at all. Not even
| open weights, nevermind open source.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Yeah I don't see anyway to download this, ollama has it as
| cloud only.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's scheduled for release. They jumped the gun with the news.
| But at far as we know, it's still coming out, just like M2.
| p-e-w wrote:
| I don't get it. What's the holdup? Uploading a model to
| Hugging Face isn't exactly difficult.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Repo made public a few minutes ago:
|
| https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.1
| jdright wrote:
| https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-m21
| jondwillis wrote:
| > MiniMax has been continuously transforming itself in a more AI-
| native way. The core driving forces of this process are models,
| Agent scaffolding, and organization. Throughout the exploration
| process, we have gained increasingly deeper understanding of
| these three aspects. Today we are releasing updates to the model
| component, namely MiniMax M2.1, hoping to help more enterprises
| and individuals find more AI-native ways of working (and living)
| sooner.
|
| This compresses to: "We are updating our model, MiniMax, to 2.1.
| Agent harnesses exist and Agents are getting more capable."
|
| A good model and agent harness, pointed at the task of writing
| this post, might suggest less verbosity and complexity-- it comes
| off as fake and hype-chasing to me, even if your model is
| actually good. I disengage there.
|
| I saw yall give a lightning talk recently and it was similarly
| hype-y. Perhaps this is a translation or cultural thing.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Not sure it's a cultural thing since most of the copy coming
| out of DeepSeek has been pretty straightforward.
| tw1984 wrote:
| so when MiniMax released a pretty capable model, you choose to
| ignore the model itself and just focus a single sentence they
| wrote in the release note and started bad mouthing it.
|
| is it a cultural thing?
| simlevesque wrote:
| If I use a software I need to trust it.
| tw1984 wrote:
| a model is not software, it is a bunch of weights.
|
| you are more than welcomed to pick whatever model or
| software you choose to trust, that is totally fine.
| However, that is vastly different from bad mouthing a model
| or software just because its release note contains a single
| sentence you don't like.
| LoganDark wrote:
| The API is software. You don't get the weights.
| logicprog wrote:
| The weights are open.
| homarp wrote:
| here https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.1
|
| GGUF https://huggingface.co/unsloth/MiniMax-M2.1-GGUF
| pembrook wrote:
| It's called bikeshedding and yes it's a cultural thing on HN.
| [1]
|
| Most people here are big company worker bees where they take
| zero risks and do very little of substance.
|
| In these organizations, it's common for large groups of
| people to get together in "meetings" and endlessly nitpick
| surface-level details of unimportant things while completely
| missing the big picture because it's far too complex to allow
| for easy opinions or smart-sounding critique.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
| jondwillis wrote:
| It's the first thing in this press release. Start with
| garbage? I'm going to assume it's all garbage.
| monster_truck wrote:
| That they are still training models against Objective-C is all
| the proof you need that it will outlive Swift.
|
| When is someone going to vibe code Objective-C 3.0? Borrowing all
| of the actual good things that have happened since 2.0 is closer
| than you'd think thanks to LLVM and friends.
| viraptor wrote:
| Why would they not? Existing objective-c apps will still need
| updates and various work. Models are still trained on assembler
| for architectures that don't meaningfully exist today as well.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I'm sure you can find some COBOL code in many of the training
| sets. Not sure I would build my next startup using COBOL.
| tomcam wrote:
| I still can't figure out what it does
| prmph wrote:
| You are not alone
| esafak wrote:
| It's an LLM for coding.
| yinuoli wrote:
| It's a neural network model, and it could generate text
| following a given text.
| tucnak wrote:
| You should ask ChatGPT.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Money, it does money
| viraptor wrote:
| I've played with this a bit and it's ok. I'd place it somewhere
| around sonnet 4.5 level, probably below. But with this aggressive
| pricing you can just run 3 copies to do the same thing, choose
| the one that succeeded and still come out way ahead with the
| cost. Not as great as following instructions as Claude models and
| can get lost, but still "good enough".
|
| I'm very happy with using it to just "do things". When doing in
| depth debugging or a massive plan is needed, I'd go with
| something better, but later going through the motions? It works.
| mr_o47 wrote:
| I won't say it's same on the level of claude models but it's
| definitely good at coming up with frontend designs
| esafak wrote:
| > It exhibits consistent and stable results in tools such as
| Claude Code, Droid (Factory AI), Cline, Kilo Code, Roo Code, and
| BlackBox, while providing reliable support for Context Management
| mechanisms including Skill.md, Claude.md/agent.md/cursorrule, and
| Slash Commands.
|
| One of the demos shows them using Claude Code, which is
| interesting. And the next sections are titled 'Digital Employee'
| and 'End-to-End Office Automation'. Their ambitions obviously go
| beyond coding. A sign of things to come...
| jimmydoe wrote:
| they are going IPO in HKEX in a few weeks. some hype up are
| necessary, not too far fetched imo, pretty much same as
| anthropic playbook.
| tw1984 wrote:
| anthropic playbook does include the false claim publicly made
| by its CEO that "in six months AI would be writing 90 percent
| of code". he made that claim 10 months ago. it is a criminal
| offence for intentionally misleading investors in many
| countries.
|
| MiniMax is like 100x more honest.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Does it come as misleading if you honestly believe what
| you're saying but are simply mistaken?
| sumedh wrote:
| > in six months AI would be writing 90 percent of code
|
| Are you still writing code by hand?
| atombender wrote:
| Claude doesn't officially support using other, non-Anthropic
| models, right? So did they patch the code or fake the Claude
| API, or some other hack to get around that?
| homarp wrote:
| you have a few 'claude' proxies on github
|
| llama.cpp recently added Anthropic API support
| https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/17570
| Invictus0 wrote:
| How is everyone monitoring the skill/utility of all these
| different models? I am overwhelmed by how many they are, and the
| challenge of monitoring their capability across so many different
| modalities.
| redman25 wrote:
| https://www.swebench.com
|
| https://swe-rebench.com
|
| https://livebench.ai/#/
|
| https://eqbench.com/#
|
| https://contextarena.ai/?needles=8
|
| https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
|
| https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
|
| https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html
|
| https://github.com/lechmazur/confabulations
|
| https://dubesor.de/benchtable
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html
|
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/DontPlanToEnd/UGI-Leaderboard
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I'd stick to artificial analysis
| pylotlight wrote:
| That has many of its own problems as well.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| This is the best summary, in my opinion. You can also see the
| individual scores on the benchmarks they use to compute their
| overall scores.
|
| It's nice and simple in the overview mode though. Breaks it
| down into an intelligence ranking, a coding ranking, and an
| agentic ranking.
|
| https://artificialanalysis.ai/
| gcanyon wrote:
| Would it kill them to use the words "AI coding agent" somewhere
| prominent?
|
| "MiniMax M2.1: Significantly Enhanced Multi-Language Programming,
| Built for Real-World Complex Tasks" could be an IDE, a UI
| framework, a performance library, or, or...
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| It's not an AI coding agent. It's an LLM that can be used for
| whatever you'd like, including powering coding agents.
| gcanyon wrote:
| HA! I _almost_ added a disclaimer to the original message
| that I wasn 't certain in my identification, hence the
| request/complaint that they didn't make it clear. But I
| figured the message would be more effective if I "confidently
| got it wrong" rather than asking, so I went with it.
| martin-t wrote:
| Some sad irony: just like saying the wrong thing is more
| likely to get you a reply, using a poor title gets them
| more engagement.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Maybe :-(
| pdyc wrote:
| That reinforces OP's point that it isn't clear from their
| wording. I initially thought it was a speech model, then I
| saw Python, etc., and it took me a bit more reading to
| understand what it actually is
| tw1984 wrote:
| its main Chinese competitor GLM is like making 50 cents USD
| each in the past 6 months from its 40 million "developer
| users", calling your flagship model "AI coding agent" is like
| telling investors "we are doing this for fun, not for money".
| boredemployee wrote:
| Internal Server Error
| sosodev wrote:
| I've spent a little bit of time testing Minimax M2. It's quite
| good given the small size but it did make some odd mistakes and
| struggle with precise instructions.
| viraptor wrote:
| This is an announcement for M2.1 not M2. It got a decent bump
| in agent capabilities.
| integricho wrote:
| Their site crashes my phone browser while scrolling. Is that the
| expected quality of output of their product?
| Tepix wrote:
| Should a website be able to crash a browser?
| jedisct1 wrote:
| If a website can crash your browser, the problem is your
| browser...
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I think people should stop comparing to sonnet, but to opus
| instead since it's so far ahead on producing code I would
| actually want to use (gemini 3 pro tends to be lacking in
| generalization and wants things to be using it's own style rather
| than adapting).
|
| Whatever benchmark opus is ahead in should be treated as a very
| important metric of proper generalization in models.
| azuanrb wrote:
| I generally prefer Sonnet as comparison too. Opus, as good as
| it is, is just too expensive. The "best" model is the one I can
| use, not the one I can't afford.
|
| These days, by default I just use Sonnet/Haiku. In most cases
| it's more than good enough for me. It's plenty with $20 plan.
|
| With MiniMax, or GLM-4.7, some people like me are just looking
| for Sonnet level capability at much cheaper price.
| baq wrote:
| are you counting price per token or price per successful
| task? I'm pretty sure opus 4.5 is cheaper per task than
| sonnet in some use cases.
| azuanrb wrote:
| Per successful tasks. The result are mixed. Like you
| mentioned, it can be cheaper but only in some use cases.
| I'm only on the $20 plan. If I use Opus and it's not as
| efficient for my current tasks, I'll burn through my limit
| pretty fast. Ended up can't use any anymore for the next
| few hours.
|
| Whereas with Sonnet/Haiku, I'm much more guaranteed to have
| 100% AI assistance throughout my coding session. This
| matters more to me right now. Just a tradeoff I'm willing
| to make.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Are you using GLM-4.7? I've just spent a fortune on Opus, and
| I heard GLM was close -- but after integrating it into
| cursor, it seems to spin forever, loose tool use, and
| generates partial? plans. I did look into using it with the
| claude cli tool, so it could be cursor specific -- but I
| havent had the best experience despite going for the pro plan
| with them. Any advise on how you're using GLM effectively? If
| at all
|
| At the moment Opus is the only model i can trust even when it
| generates "refactoring work", it can do the refactoring.
| azuanrb wrote:
| I'm on the Lite plan. For coding, I still prefer Claude
| because the models are simply better. I mainly use CLI
| tools like Claude Code and OpenCode.
|
| I'm also managing a few projects and teams. One way I'm
| getting value from my GLM subscription is by building a
| daily GitHub PR summary bot using a GitHub Action. It's
| good enough for me to keep up with the team and to monitor
| higher-risk PRs.
|
| Right now I'm using GLM more as an agent/API rather than as
| a coding tool. Claude works best for agentic coding for me.
|
| I'm on Claude $20 plan and I usually start with Haiku, then
| I switch to Sonnet or Opus for harder or longer tasks.
| sumedh wrote:
| > I did look into using it with the claude cli tool, so it
| could be cursor specific
|
| Claude Code with GLM seems ok to me, I just it use it as a
| backup LLM if in case I hit usage limits but for some light
| refactoring it did the job well.
|
| Are you also facing issues with Claude Code and GLM?
| andai wrote:
| Opus is 3x cheaper now.
|
| I think it's still not on the $20 plan tho which is sad.
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| It is now. But the limit on $20 plan is quite low and easy
| to use up.
| azuanrb wrote:
| Available since few weeks ago.
|
| > Claude Opus 4.5, our frontier coding model, is now
| available in Claude Code for Pro users. Pro users can
| select Opus 4.5 using the /model command in their terminal.
|
| Opus 4.5 will consume rate limits faster than Sonnet 4.5.
| We recommend using Opus for your most complex tasks and
| using Sonnet for simpler tasks.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Use Claude Opus in Antigravity. Google is very generous
| with the limits. The best part is, if you hit your limit,
| you can switch to Gemini Pro High.
|
| I think Google is able to do this because they host Claude
| on their own TPUs in their datacentres (probably for Vertex
| AI customers). So they can undercut just about anyone
| include Anthropic on costs!
|
| No matter which model you start with, having the other
| frontier model as a backup is fantastic. Essentially you're
| getting 2x the limit.
| Tepix wrote:
| The weights got released on huggingface now.
|
| https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.1
| stpedgwdgfhgdd wrote:
| Internal Server Error
| 01-_- wrote:
| me too
| gempir wrote:
| Very anecdotal but for me this model has very weak prompt
| adherence. I compared it a tiny bit to gemini flash 3.0 and
| simple things like "don't use markdown tables in output" was very
| hard to get with m2.1
|
| Took me like 5 prompt iterations until it finally listened.
|
| But it's very good, better than flash 3.0 in terms of code output
| and reasoning while being cheaper.
| m00dy wrote:
| I used gemini-3-pro-preview on Deepwalker [0]. It was good, then
| switched to gemini-3-flash, It's ok. It gets the job done.
| Looking for some alternatives such as GLM and Minimax. Very
| curious about their agentic performance. Like long running tasks
| with reasoning.
|
| [0]: https://deepwalker.xyz
| p5v wrote:
| Has anyone used this in earnest with something like OpenCode?
| Over the past few months I've tested a dozen models that were
| claimed to be nearly as good Claude Code or Codex, but the
| overall experience when using them with OpenCode was close to
| abysmal. Not even a single one was able to do a decent code
| editing job on a real-world codebase.
| t1amat wrote:
| With M2, yes - I've used it in Claude Code (e.g. native tool
| calling), Roo/Cline (e.g. custom tool parsing), etc. It's quite
| good and for some time the best model to self-host. At 4bit it
| can fit on 2x RTX 6000 Pro (e.g. ~200GB VRAM) with about 400k
| context at fp8 kv cache. It's very fast due to low active
| params, stable at long context, quite capable in any agent
| harness (its training specialty). M2.1 should be a good bump
| beyond M2, which was undertrained relative to even much smaller
| models.
| sillyboi wrote:
| Internal server error..
| erdemo wrote:
| The intro video is so cringe as their AI agent name.
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