Kolibri-1 vs MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

Kolibri-1

Kolibri-1 is a German and English reasoning model with a documented tool-call format, switchable thinking and a 262,144-token context, under Apache 2.0. Aleph Alpha's FP8 build needs about 95 GB and runs on vLLM through its plugin, Transformers 5.20 or recent llama.cpp. The main risk is no published safety results or security contact, and few repository answers.

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.

Kolibri-1

1. Start it with pip install 'aleph-alpha-inference>=1' then vllm serve Aleph-Alpha/Kolibri-1 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --reasoning-parser kolibri1 --tool-call-parser kolibri1 --enable-auto-tool-choice
2. Without the kolibri1 tool-call parser and enable-auto-tool-choice, tool calls come back as text in tool_call tags
3. The plugin supports one vLLM minor version, 0.29, so don't upgrade vLLM while it's installed
4. Thinking is on by default at high effort. Pass reasoning_effort none or enable_thinking false in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
5. Recommended sampling is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.97 and top_k 128
6. Past 262,144 tokens, add --max-model-len 1048576 and the max_position_embeddings override in --hf-overrides, though Aleph Alpha recommends staying at or below 262,144
7. With Transformers 5.20 or later, tokenizer.parse_response returns the answer in content and the reasoning in thinking
8. On the reference machine the FP8 build fits by size, but no document confirms vLLM runs FP8 on gfx1151, and Aleph Alpha ships no GGUF for llama.cpp
9. Validate tool results in your own code, as the card asks

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