Model launches
MiniMax shipped an 'open-weight' model with no weights. Bold.
Frontier claims, vendor benchmarks, and a Hugging Face link that wasn't there yet.
MiniMax M3 launched 1 June 2026 as 'open-weight' — but the weights weren't released.
MiniMax's M3 arrived on 1 June with the maximal pitch: first open-weight model to fuse frontier coding, million-token context and native multimodality. SWE-Bench Pro 59%, ahead of GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Pricing about a tenth of the closed frontier. Cracking — if you take it on faith.
What you couldn't do on launch day
Download it. Reproduce the benchmark. Self-host it. MiniMax said the weights would hit Hugging Face 'within about ten days', which means the one feature that distinguishes an open model from a closed one — you can actually run it — was a promise. The benchmarks, meanwhile, are vendor-run, on a brand-new model, with no independent check possible.
The market couldn't decide either: MiniMax's Hong Kong stock popped ~5% then closed down ~12% the same session — a launch and a gut-check in one afternoon. And the unglamorous footnote: under 12% on ARC-AGI-2. Coding monster, maybe; reasoning monster, no. Wait for the weights before you believe the chart.
Sources
- MiniMax M3 Open-Weight Coding Model: Frontier Claims, Unverified Benchmarks — Tech Times, 1 June 2026
- MiniMax launches M3, an open-weight frontier model with 1M context — DataNorth, 1 June 2026
- What Is MiniMax M3? The First Open-Weight Frontier Coding Model — Apidog, 2 June 2026