$ diff grok-4-6 minimax-m3
Grok 4.6 vs MiniMax M3
Values come from Grok 4.6 and MiniMax M3, where each is cited to its source. This page states no benchmark result and ranks neither model — it puts two published specifications next to each other. Where a lab has not published a figure, the row says so rather than guessing.
xAIGrok 4.6
- context
- 500K
- weights
- closed
- $/M in
- $2
- $/M out
- $6
- context
- 1M
- weights
- open
- $/M in
- $0.3
- $/M out
- $1.2
What actually differs
- Context window
- MiniMax M3 takes 1M against 500K — 2× more room in a single request.
- Input price
- MiniMax M3 at $0.3/M against $2/M — 6.7× cheaper to feed. Standard rates: one of these labs also quotes a lower cached-input tier, which applies only when a prefix is reused — see the full spec below.
- Output price
- MiniMax M3 at $1.2/M against $6/M — 5.0× cheaper to generate. Output dominates the bill on most agentic workloads, where the model writes far more than it reads.
- Weights
- MiniMax M3 publishes weights (Open-weight (HuggingFace)); Grok 4.6 is API-only. That decides self-hosting, air-gapped deployment and fine-tuning before any capability question does.
- Recency
- Grok 4.6 shipped 67 days after MiniMax M3 (2026-08-07 vs 2026-06-01).
Full spec
| Attribute | Grok 4.6 | MiniMax M3 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | xAI | MiniMax |
| Released | 2026-08-07 | 2026-06-01 |
| Context window | 500,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens (1M); min. 512K guaranteed |
| Pricing | $2/M input · $6/M output; a request reaching 200K tokens re-prices in full at $4.00/M input · $1.00/M cached input · $12.00/M output | $0.30/M input · $1.20/M output ($0.06/M cached input) — OpenRouter catalogue, read 2026-07-28 |
| License | proprietary | Open-weight (HuggingFace) |
| Availability | API | API (global, including English) + open-weight on HuggingFace |