GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) vs MiniMax-M3

Which is better for the money: GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) by OpenAI or MiniMax-M3 by MiniMax? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.

Trade-off

OpenAIGPT-5.6 Terra (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 42.10
Total cost: $2501

MiniMaxMiniMax-M3Off the frontier

Intelligence: 29.20
Total cost: $538

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) scores 12.9 points higher (42.1 vs 29.2) but costs 4.6× as much to run the benchmark ($2501 vs $538; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) when you need intelligence above 29.2, and MiniMax-M3 when 29.2 is enough.

Metric	GPT-5.6 Terra (Max)	MiniMax-M3	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	42.1	29.2	−30.6% MiniMax-M3 is 30.6% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,500.72	$537.98	−78.5% MiniMax-M3 is 78.5% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	104.98s	26.74s	−74.5% MiniMax-M3 is 74.5% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $12.0	$0.30 / $1.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Video

MiniMax-M3 vs GPT-5.6 Terra (Max): 30.6% less intelligence, 78.5% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 74.5% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker GPT-5.6 Terra (Max): what beats it MiniMax-M3: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.
MiniMax-M3 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max)MiniMax-M3Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/gpt-5-6-terra/minimax-m3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/gpt-5-6-terra/minimax-m3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill