MiniMax released M3 today and the API is already live. Worth separating what comes from their own official model page versus what comes from the launch announcement, because some of the numbers are sourced differently.
From the official model page: BrowseComp 83.5, ahead of Claude Opus 4.7 at 79.3. PostTrainBench 37.1, which ranks third behind Opus 4.7 at 42.4 and GPT-5.5 at 39.3. From the launch announcement: SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal Bench 2.1 66.0%, MCP Atlas 74.2%. The headline "beats Opus" is BrowseComp-specific, not a general capability claim across all dimensions.
The context window is up to 1M tokens, implemented through their in-house MiniMax Sparse Attention architecture. They state 512K as the guaranteed minimum with 1M as the ceiling. The model was trained on 100T+ tokens and is natively multimodal rather than vision being added after the fact.
Open-weights release is coming to HuggingFace and GitHub but listed as "coming soon." API access is available now through several paths, including OpenAI-compatible endpoints, while the weights are still pending. The model also supports native MCP tooling, which is where the 74.2% MCP Atlas number comes from.
The demo claims are the part worth being skeptical about. A 12-hour autonomous ICLR paper replication run and a CUDA kernel optimization loop reaching 9.4x speedup are impressive if real, but these are curated showcase demos that are hard to evaluate from a screenshot. Whether sparse attention holds up at 900K+ tokens in practice rather than in controlled benchmarks is an open question.
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