GPT-5.6 Terra Max vs MiniMax-M3.1-Flash compared

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) from OpenAI and MiniMax-M3.1-Flash from MiniMax are both tracked in Franklin AI's benchmark catalogue. Price separates them more than anything else; on a blended basis GPT-5.6 Terra Max costs 17 times as much as MiniMax-M3.1-Flash. Everything below is read from the benchmark, price and speed data in Franklin AI's catalogue; nothing here comes from a hands-on test.

Token pricing and a sample bill

GPT-5.6 Terra Max lists $2.00 per million input tokens and $12.00 per million output tokens; MiniMax-M3.1-Flash lists $0.15 and $0.60. That makes MiniMax-M3.1-Flash's output 95% cheaper.

Take 1 million input tokens and 200,000 output tokens: that comes to $4.40 on GPT-5.6 Terra Max and $0.27 on MiniMax-M3.1-Flash. Scale it up to a month of coding-assistant traffic at 30 million input and 3 million output tokens and the bill is $96.00 for GPT-5.6 Terra Max against $6.30 for MiniMax-M3.1-Flash. Blended at three input tokens per output token, the effective rates are $4.50 for GPT-5.6 Terra Max and $0.262 for MiniMax-M3.1-Flash.

Speed and latency

Once a response is under way, GPT-5.6 Terra Max produces roughly 116 tokens per second against 147 tokens per second for MiniMax-M3.1-Flash. That makes MiniMax-M3.1-Flash roughly 1.3 times as fast at writing. The wait for the first token averages 3.4 minutes on GPT-5.6 Terra Max against 1.0 seconds on MiniMax-M3.1-Flash. GPT-5.6 Terra Max waits 203 times as long before its first token. Waits that long are felt on every chat-style request, though they matter less for batch jobs.

Put together, a 2,000-token answer would take about 3.7 minutes from GPT-5.6 Terra Max and 15 seconds from MiniMax-M3.1-Flash, counting the first-token wait.

When they came out

The release dates are July 9, 2026 for GPT-5.6 Terra Max and October 19, 2026 for MiniMax-M3.1-Flash, about 3 months apart.

GPT-5.6 Terra Max leads on the intelligence index

GPT-5.6 Terra Max comes out ahead on the intelligence index, 32.3 to 29.1. It is a meaningful gap rather than a rounding difference. Put another way, MiniMax-M3.1-Flash would need 11% more on this index to draw level.

For context, that places GPT-5.6 Terra Max 46th and MiniMax-M3.1-Flash 59th out of 109 scored models still on offer.

The catalogue does not yet split either model's score into coding and math indexes.

Score per dollar

Per point of intelligence index, GPT-5.6 Terra Max costs $0.14 of blended price per million tokens and MiniMax-M3.1-Flash $0.0090. MiniMax-M3.1-Flash delivers each index point for 94% less; whether GPT-5.6 Terra Max's extra 3.2 points are worth the premium depends on how often your tasks need them.