MiniMax-M2.5 vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

MiniMax-M2.5

MiniMax-M2.5 is a 230B mixture-of-experts model for coding and agent work, with parallel tool calls, a 196K context and parsers in vLLM and SGLang. It needs a 4-GPU server for FP8 or about 155 GB for a 4-bit build. The main risk is a licence replaced after release with a Prohibited Uses Policy while the card still says modified MIT.

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

An omni-modal cousin that listens, watches and reads, then answers in text or one of three voices, with tool calls from spoken requests, under plain Apache 2.0. Its only build, BF16, needs about 85 GB, and speech out needs Transformers or vLLM-Omni. The main risk is no answers from Qwen and no safety work for speech-driven actions.

MiniMax-M2.5

1. Start it with vLLM on 4 GPUs of 96 GB, SAFETENSORS_FAST_GPU=1 vllm serve MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.5 --trust-remote-code --tensor-parallel-size 4 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser minimax_m2 --reasoning-parser minimax_m2_append_think
2. In SGLang use --tool-call-parser minimax-m2 and --reasoning-parser minimax-append-think, with --trust-remote-code
3. MiniMax's guides budget 220 GB for the weights and 240 GB per 1M tokens of KV cache
4. On a single large-memory machine, LM Studio's catalogue entry minimax/minimax-m2.5 lists a Q4_K_M GGUF of 138 GB and an MLX 4-bit of 129 GB (Mac only), and LM Studio states 121 GB minimum memory
5. Sample with temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 40, as the card recommends
6. Budget output tokens for thinking on every turn, since the template always opens a think block
7. Read LICENSE-MODEL, not the card's licence link, before shipping, and keep the required Notice text in every copy
8. Without the hardware, call it through Novita or Featherless AI; MiniMax's own API retires M2.5 on 18 November 2026

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

1. For text answers, mkdir -p media && vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct --dtype bfloat16 --max-model-len 32768 --allowed-local-media-path "$(pwd)/media" with vLLM 0.11.1 or later serves the Thinker on an OpenAI-compatible API
2. The card's command passes --allowed-local-media-path /, which lets anyone who can reach the server have it read any file on the machine through a file:// URL. Point it at a dedicated folder that holds only the media you mean to send, as above, and give vLLM an absolute path
3. Send audio as audio_url and images as image_url content parts; vLLM serve doesn't take use_audio_in_video, so pass a video's audio separately
4. For speech out, load Qwen3OmniMoeForConditionalGeneration in Transformers 4.57.0 or later with qwen-omni-utils, pick speaker Ethan, Chelsie or Aiden, and write the returned waveform at 24 kHz
5. Call model.disable_talker() or pass return_audio=False when you only need text, which saves about 10 GB and time
6. Parse tool calls as JSON inside <tool_call> tags yourself, since no parser is named, and confirm actions triggered by speech before running them
7. Keep use_audio_in_video the same across every step of a conversation, the card warns results go wrong otherwise
8. Budget memory for video, the card's table rises from 78.85 GB for 15 seconds to 144.81 GB for 120 seconds in BF16