Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

MiniCPM-o 4.5 vs MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

MiniCPM-o 4.5 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against MiniMax-M3.1-Flash's 50.5 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. MiniMax-M3.1-Flash leads on agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Which one, for what

MiniCPM-o 4.5 C

Best for Agents that need a local model to see, hear and speak on a laptop or a single small GPU, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 40
  • Risk, 40 against 35
  • Documentation and upkeep, 66 against 41

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 2.8 against 2.3 out of 5

Watch for

Speech output and full duplex need trust_remote_code with Transformers 4.51.0 or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash D

Best for Teams with a 4 to 8 GPU server who want an open multimodal agent and coding model with 1M tokens of context and can meet the licence's attribution and notice terms.

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 70 against 35

Watch for

No released vLLM or SGLang ran it on 24 October 2026; only llama.cpp b11861 from that day did

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiniCPM-o 4.5MiniMax-M3.1-FlashEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259040MiniCPM-o 4.5 +50
Risk20%204035MiniCPM-o 4.5 +5
Agent interface10%103570MiniMax-M3.1-Flash +35
Documentation and upkeep10%106641MiniCPM-o 4.5 +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100D 50.5/100

Facts side by side

FactMiniCPM-o 4.5MiniMax-M3.1-Flash
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOpenBMBMiniMax
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0; built from Qwen3-8B, SigLIP2, Whisper-medium and CosyVoice2, all Apache 2.0 on their Hub cardsMiniMax Community License (custom; commercial use needs a "Built with MiniMax M3.1-Flash" line and a one-time notice to MiniMax, and MiniMax's written authorisation above $20M yearly revenue)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-162026-10-23
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.3/5 (4)

Verdicts

MiniCPM-o 4.5

A small omni cousin that sees, listens and talks back, with full-duplex speech and voice cloning, in about 7 GB at 4-bit through llama.cpp or Ollama for text and images. Speech output needs OpenBMB's remote code or llama.cpp-omni, and 28 GB of GPU for the full demo. The main risks are repository code and pickle files and no safety results.

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.

Before you call either

MiniCPM-o 4.5

  1. Quickest start for text and images is ollama run openbmb/minicpm-o4.5, about 6 GB
  2. With vLLM 0.16.0 or later pass --trust-remote-code, and send stop_token_ids [151643, 151645] as OpenBMB's guide does
  3. vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama return text only; for speech out use the card's Transformers 4.51.0 code or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni
  4. In llama.cpp pass both the language GGUF and MiniCPM-o-4_5-vision-F16.gguf with --mmproj, and use --jinja --reasoning-budget 0 to turn thinking off
  5. Keep prompts within 40,960 tokens
  6. Don't rely on tool calls or JSON output, neither is documented; validate any you get

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

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiniCPM-o 4.5 or MiniMax-M3.1-Flash?

MiniCPM-o 4.5 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against MiniMax-M3.1-Flash's 50.5 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. MiniMax-M3.1-Flash leads on agent interface.

Other comparisons with MiniCPM-o 4.5 or MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

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