Koala vs. MiniMax

Overview

Released alongside Vicuna, Koala is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the web. On the developers' benchmarks, Koala outperforms its sibling Alpaca, though its adoption has been significantly less than that of its other sibling, Vicuna. Due to its use of LLaMA, only research use is permitted.

Initial release: 2023-04-03

Reference

https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2023/04/03/koala/

Further Reading

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