Justy: Okay, MiniMax just dropped M3 and it’s apparently outrunning GPT-five-point-five and Gemini three-point-one Pro on benchmarks… for five to ten percent of the cost.
Cody: No way.
Justy: Way. Twenty bucks a month for the subscription plan, open weights in like ten days.
Cody: That’s… that’s Exploring Next levels of ‘wait, what’.
Justy: I know, I know. I was in San Diego all week for my cousin’s thing—
Cody: Mm-hm.
Justy: —and came back to my inbox full of people losing their minds over this. Anyway— this thing does a million-token context window, native multimodal, and the coding benchmarks are supposedly nuts.
Cody: Hold on. A million tokens with those performance numbers?
Justy: That’s what the VentureBeat piece says.
Cody: Alright, so how? Because traditional attention is O of N squared, right? You can’t just magic that away.
Justy: They’re calling it MiniMax Sparse Attention. MSA.
Cody: Right. So MSA pre-filters the KV matrices into blocks—
Justy: Mm-hm.
Cody: —then it does this KV outer gather Q thing. Treats the blocks as an outer loop, dynamically pulls only the queries that hit them. Each block read once, memory access optimized. So instead of rereading the whole library every time, it’s like… a really good index.
Justy: So it’s not just cheaper, it’s genuinely smarter about long context.
Cody: Yeah. And the pricing table’s wild—M3’s at one-fifty total for input and output right now, limited time. Full price is still under two-fifty. GPT-5.5’s at thirty-five.
Justy: Okay but Cody— who actually switches because of this?
Cody: Startups, probably. Anyone who’s been priced out of the top-tier APIs.
Justy: But enterprises? They’re not touching open weights without a ton of vetting.
Cody: True. And we don’t know latency numbers yet. Or how the fine-tuning stack holds up.
Justy: Still. Open weights in ten days changes the math for a lot of teams.
Cody: Unless the licensing’s weird. Or the model’s got some hidden gotcha.
Justy: There it is. Cody’s doom spiral kicks in right on schedule.
Cody: I’m just saying, if this checks out… this is the first time the open side of the market doesn’t feel like a compromise.
Justy: Fine, fine. I’ll give you this—it’s the first model that makes me think maybe we’re not stuck with the old trade-off.
Cody: Yeah. And if MSA scales… that’s a real architectural win.
Justy: Alright, I’m convinced. For now. Let’s see what the open weights look like in a week.
Cody: Deal. Just promise me you won’t start pitching this to your PM friends as the next big thing before the fine print’s out.
Justy: No promises.