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MiniMax M3 vs Yi-Lightning

How do these models stack up? Below is an expert side-by-side comparison of specifications, context window capacity, live pricing per million tokens, and standardized benchmark scores for MiniMax M3 and Yi-Lightning.

MiniMax

MiniMax M3

MiniMax-M3 is a multimodal foundation model from MiniMax. It supports text, image, and video inputs with text output, a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agentic work, coding,...

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01.AI

Yi-Lightning

Yi-Lightning is 01.AI's (離一万物) fastest and most cost-efficient model, purpose-built for high-throughput production workloads. It delivers competitive performance against GPT-4o-mini and Claude Haiku at a fraction of the cost, with exceptional bilingual Chinese-English capabilities. Yi-Lightning excels at classification, entity extraction, summarization, and high-frequency API tasks where latency and cost-per-call are critical constraints.

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Technical Specifications

SpecificationMiniMax M3Yi-Lightning
ProviderMiniMax01.AI
Context Window1,048,576 tokens131,072 tokens
Agent SuitabilityN/A82/100
Time to First Token (TTFT)N/A120 ms
Deployment Modelmanaged apimanaged api
Production Stabilitybetastable
API AvailableYesYes
Released Date2026-05-312025-10-01

API Pricing Comparison

Input Price per Million Tokens

MiniMax M3

$0.30

Yi-Lightning

$0.15

Output Price per Million Tokens

MiniMax M3

$1.20

Yi-Lightning

$0.30

Want to test both models live?

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Benchmark Performance Metrics

Scores show the raw performance percentages verified across key evaluation suites. Higher bars indicate superior accuracy and capability in that domain.

MMLUGeneral knowledge & multi-task understanding
8400.0%vsN/A
MiniMax M3
Yi-Lightning
HumanEvalPython coding & logic synthesis
8350.0%vsN/A
MiniMax M3
Yi-Lightning
MATHComplex mathematical problem solving
6200.0%vsN/A
MiniMax M3
Yi-Lightning
GPQAGraduate-level expert reasoning
4250.0%vsN/A
MiniMax M3
Yi-Lightning
HellaSwagCommonsense reasoning and inference
8520.0%vsN/A
MiniMax M3
Yi-Lightning
MT-BenchMulti-turn conversation flow quality
888.0%vsN/A
MiniMax M3
Yi-Lightning

MiniMax M3 Quirks & Gotchas

No developer gotchas reported.

Yi-Lightning Quirks & Gotchas

  • β–ΈBest cost-efficiency for high-volume bilingual applications
  • β–ΈSelf-hostable via Ollama β€” excellent open-weight option for Asian-language pipelines