Comment by terhechte
5 hours ago
The weights have yet to be released. The previous MiniMax M3 had (I think) ~428B parameters. Since this one is called Flash and they advertise it as inference being 3 times faster, there's the possibility that this will be a ~150B size model which would (quantized) run on DGX Spark or 128GB Macs or the new AMD AI systems.
The FAQ on their website says Minimax 3.1 flash is 428B total, 23B active
Which is roughly similar to deepseek 4.1 flash.
I find it interesting that we’re calling these “flash” models now, even though they aren’t “small or light” and in many cases aren’t particularly that fast.
I suppose it’s more so that the standard for “regular models” is becoming 1T+
https://agent.minimax.io/tools/m3-1-flash-preview
Flash probably means single expert fits into some cost efficient GPU memory, and non flash models require more complex and cost expensive architectures.
I think flash usually means MoE, not dense
Every frontier model is MoE these days! Flash or otherwise. Sparsity just gets you more bang for your buck.
Not really. “Flash” generally means fast or cost-efficient, not specifically MoE (Mixture of Experts).
- DeepSeek V4 Flash: 284B / 13B active MoE
- DeepSeek V4 Pro: 1.6T / 49B active MoE
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 552B / 8B input, 16B output MoE