BigBang-v1 vs MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

BigBang-v1

A Qwen3.6-35B-A3B fine-tuned on synthetic research problems, under plain Apache 2.0, for search, science and coding work. The publisher ships BF16 only, about 86 GB to run, and has no report, safety results or replies to questions, so smaller builds and support come from others.

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

A 428B mixture-of-experts model, 23B active, for agent work, coding and computer use, with image and video input, about 1M tokens of context and parallel tool calls. It needs a 4 to 8 GPU server for 250 GB of NVFP4 and MXFP8 weights, and vLLM and SGLang support was pre-release on 24 October 2026. Commercial use needs attribution and notice.

BigBang-v1

1. On the reference machine use vllm serve endless-frontier/BigBang-v1 --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
2. The card says to keep at least 128K of context so its thinking isn't cut short
3. Thinking control isn't documented, try the base template's enable_thinking false in chat_template_kwargs and check the output
4. For a smaller build you'll need someone else's quantisation, the publisher has none
5. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

1. Check the use case first; commercial products must show "Built with MiniMax M3.1-Flash" and notify MiniMax once, or get written authorisation above $20M yearly revenue
2. On 8 H100 or H200 GPUs use vLLM's nightly image vllm/vllm-openai:minimax-m31-flash with --tensor-parallel-size 8 --block-size 128 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --moe-backend marlin --max-model-len 262144
3. Pass --reasoning-parser minimax_m3 --tool-call-parser minimax_m3 --enable-auto-tool-choice in vLLM, or minimax-m3 for both in SGLang with --trust-remote-code
4. --block-size 128 is mandatory in vLLM, since MSA's sparse block size is 128
5. Set effort per request with chat_template_kwargs reasoning_effort (low, medium, high, xhigh, max); sample at temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95
6. On Blackwell or MI355X, 4 GPUs serve it with the DSpark draft from dspark/; vLLM's Hopper command leaves DSpark off and turns video input off
7. For GGUF builds by others, use llama.cpp b11861 or later; earlier builds mis-scale the NVFP4 experts and produce garbage
8. Without the hardware, call MiniMax-M3.1-Flash on MiniMax's API (minimax-api), whose thinking defaults to max effort