Compare MiniMax M2.5 vs. Step 3.5 Flash

MiniMax M2.5 is a next-generation foundation model built to power complex, economically valuable tasks with speed and cost efficiency. Trained using large-scale reinforcement learning across hundreds of thousands of real-world task environments, it excels in coding, tool use, search, and professional office workflows. In programming benchmarks such as SWE-Bench Verified and Multi-SWE-Bench, M2.5 reaches state-of-the-art levels while demonstrating improved multilingual coding performance. The model exhibits architect-level reasoning, planning system structure and feature decomposition before writing code. With throughput speeds of up to 100 tokens per second, it completes complex evaluations significantly faster than earlier versions. Reinforcement learning optimizations enable more precise search rounds and fewer reasoning steps, improving overall efficiency. M2.5 is available in two variants—standard and Lightning—offering identical capabilities with different speed configurations. Pricing is designed to be dramatically lower than competing frontier models, reducing cost barriers for large-scale agent deployment. Integrated into MiniMax Agent, the model supports advanced office skills including Word formatting, Excel financial modeling, and PowerPoint editing. By combining high performance, efficiency, and affordability, MiniMax M2.5 aims to make agent-powered productivity accessible at scale.

Step 3.5 Flash is a cutting-edge open-source foundational language model designed for advanced reasoning and agent-like capabilities, optimized for efficiency; it utilizes a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture that activates only approximately 11 billion of its nearly 196 billion parameters per token, ensuring high-density intelligence and quick responsiveness. The model features a 3-way Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) mechanism that allows it to generate hundreds of tokens per second, facilitating complex multi-step reasoning and task execution while efficiently managing long contexts through a hybrid sliding window attention method that minimizes computational demands across extensive datasets or codebases. Its performance on reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks is formidable, often matching or surpassing that of much larger proprietary models, and it incorporates a scalable reinforcement learning system that enables continuous self-enhancement. Moreover, this innovative approach positions Step 3.5 Flash as a significant player in the field of AI language models, showcasing its potential to revolutionize various applications.