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LLM Index

MiniMax vs. Phi

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

Attribute MiniMax Phi
Developer MiniMax Microsoft
Current generation MiniMax M3 Phi-4
Initial release 2025-01-15 2023-06-20
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License MiniMax Community MIT
Model sizes 428B (23B active) 3.8B, 5.6B, 14B
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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

Phi

Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.

Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.

Further reading

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