MiniMax vs. Pythia

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

• www.minimax.io/news/minimax-01-series-2
• www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m3
• huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3

Pythia

The most recent (as of May 2023) effort from EleutherAI, Pythia is a set of LLMs trained on The Pile. While it appears to outperform OPT and GPTNeo, its performance against GPT-J is unclear. Versions of Pythia have also been instruct-tuned by the team at Together.