MiniMax-M1
Open-weight 456B hybrid-attention reasoning model with a native 1 million token context window.
About
MiniMax-M1 was the first open-weight large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model, released by MiniMax in June 2025 under Apache-2.0. The 456B-parameter mixture-of-experts activates 45.9B parameters per token and interleaves lightning attention, a linear-attention variant, with periodic softmax attention blocks, which is what lets it natively handle a 1 million token context while using roughly a quarter of DeepSeek R1's FLOPs at 100K-token generation lengths. Post-training used large-scale reinforcement learning with CISPO, an algorithm that clips importance sampling weights instead of token updates, and the model ships in two versions with 40K and 80K thinking budgets. Benchmark strengths center on long-context understanding, mathematical reasoning, tool use, and software engineering, including 56.0 percent on SWE-bench Verified. MiniMax recommends vLLM 0.9.2 or newer for serving and provides Transformers deployment and function-calling guides, with weights on Hugging Face; hosted access runs through the MiniMax API platform and chatbot. Hardware needs are datacenter-class given the parameter count.
Should you use MiniMax-M1?
Pick it when
Pick this when you need reasoning over very long inputs, such as whole codebases or document sets approaching 1M tokens, under Apache-2.0, and you have datacenter GPUs or are fine using the MiniMax API for hosted access.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you lack datacenter hardware or need image input, which this 456B model does not take. MiniMax M3 is the newer multimodal successor with fewer active parameters, though under a community license instead of Apache-2.0.
Alternatives to MiniMax-M1
- MiniMax M3
Newer, with 23B active versus 45.9B plus native image and video input, but under the MiniMax Community license instead of Apache-2.0.
- DeepSeek-R1
MIT reasoning model with 1.5B to 70B distills that fit ordinary GPUs, but without the hybrid attention built for 1M-token inputs.
- Llama 4
Scout reaches a 10M token context with 17B active parameters, but under the Llama 4 Community license and not post-trained as a reasoning model.
- InternLM 2.5
Reaches about 1M tokens at 7B and 20B sizes that fit one GPU, trading away the scale and reasoning depth of a 456B MoE.
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Details
- Category
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Price
- Freemium
- Platform
- Hybrid
- Difficulty
- Advanced (4/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026