Falcon vs. MiniMax

Overview

Falcon LLM is the flagship LLM of the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi.

Falcon LLM is a powerful LLM developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (https://www.tii.ae). Unlike other popular LLMs, Falcon was not built off of LLaMA, but instead using a custom data pipeline and distributed training system. The dataset is the RefinedWeb dataset (available on Hugging Face), and the initial models are available in 7B and 40B forms. Instruct and chat-finetuned models are available as well. Perhaps most excitingly, Falcon outperforms LLaMA, the previous de facto pretrained LLM.

Initial release: 2023-05-23

Reference

https://falconllm.tii.ae/

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/tiiuae
• https://twitter.com/Thom_Wolf/status/1662085371826405377
• https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230531005608/en/UAE%E2%80%99s-Falcon-40B-World%E2%80%99s-Top-Ranked-AI-Model-from-Technology-Innovation-Institute-is-Now-Royalty-Free

Overview

MiniMax is an open-weight model family spanning language, reasoning, multimodal, and agentic workloads. MiniMax M3 is the current generation.

MiniMax introduced the open MiniMax-01 series in January 2025 and followed it with the M1 and M2 reasoning and agent models. MiniMax M3, released in June 2026, is a 428B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with about 23B active parameters. It combines native image and video understanding, a one-million-token context window, sparse attention, computer use, coding, and long-horizon agent capabilities.

Initial release: 2025-01-15

Current generation: MiniMax M3

Reference

https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m3

Further Reading

• https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-01-series-2
• https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m3
• https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3