MiniMax M3.1 Flash shows China's AI price race has no floor in sight

Chinese AI startup MiniMax has released M3.1 Flash, a 428B-parameter mixture-of-experts model featuring a 1 million-token context window. Priced at $0.15 per million input tokens, the model is designed for agentic tasks and represents an effort by the company to lower costs while scaling performance. The release follows recent updates to the company's proprietary model lineup, with the model weights scheduled for public release on October 23.