FastChat vs. MiniMax

Overview

FastChat is the open platform for training, serving, and evaluating LLM chatbots developed and maintained by LMSYS.

FastChat is an open-source library for training, serving, and evaluating LLM chat systems from LMSYS. It includes training and evaluation code, a model serving system, a Web GUI, and a finetuning pipeline, and is the de facto system for Vicuna as well as FastChat-T5. FastChat also includes the Chatbot Arena for benchmarking LLMs.

Initial release: 2023-04-28

Reference

https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat

Further Reading

• https://chat.lmsys.org/
• https://lmsys.org/projects/

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