MiniMax-M3.1-Flash vs Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B

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.

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B

A mid-size coding and terminal-agent cousin with about 3B active parameters, XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse and 262,144 tokens of context. It runs in about 24 GB from Ornith's MLX 4-bit build or 32 GB from its GGUF. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, safety results or replies to 35 reports.

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

Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B

1. Start it with ollama run ornith-1.5:35b, or llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-GGUF --port 8000 -c 262144 as the card gives it
2. In vLLM pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3, and in SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
3. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
4. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
5. Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for general tasks and temperature 1.0 to reproduce the card's benchmarks
6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place, and add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-35B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp
7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented