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LLM Index

MiniMax vs. Orca

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

Attribute MiniMax Orca
Developer MiniMax Microsoft
Current generation MiniMax M3 –
Initial release 2025-01-15 2023-06-05
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes No
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License MiniMax Community Noncommercial
Model sizes 428B (23B active) 13B
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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

Orca

Orca is a descendant of LLaMA developed by Microsoft with finetuning on explanation traces obtained from GPT-4.

Orca-13B is a LLM developed by Microsoft. It is based on LLaMA with finetuning on complex explanation traces obtained from GPT-4. By using rich signals, Orca surpasses the performance of models such as Vicuna-13B on complex tasks. However, given its model backbone and the data used for its finetuning, Orca is under noncommercial use.

Further reading

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Other MiniMax comparisons

Other Orca comparisons