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LLM Index

Llama vs. MiniMax

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute Llama MiniMax
Developer Meta MiniMax
Current generation Llama 4 MiniMax M3
Initial release 2023-02-24 2025-01-15
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Llama Community License MiniMax Community
Model sizes 109B (17B active), 400B (17B active) 428B (23B active)
Links
Website
Website Pricing

Llama

Llama is Meta's open-weight model family. Llama 4 was its last major generation; Meta's active assistant-model development has shifted to Muse.

Meta introduced LLaMA in February 2023, helping catalyze the modern open-weight model ecosystem. Llama 2 added commercial use and chat tuning, while the Llama 3 series improved scale, multilingual support, and instruction following. Llama 4, released in April 2025, introduced native multimodality and a mixture-of-experts architecture. Meta subsequently shifted its actively promoted assistant-model line to the proprietary Muse family, but Llama models remain widely used and deployed.

Further reading

MiniMax

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.

Further reading

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