MiniMax M3 is cheaper than Kimi K2 Thinking at $0.3/M vs $0.6/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Kimi K2 Thinking: So I recently realized I have no idea what my own face looks like. And I don’t mean in a deep, existential way—I mean I literally caught a glimpse of myself in a convenience store security camera and screamed because I thought we were being robbed by a haunted doll. We’ve all got this image of ourselves, right?
MiniMax M3: "The Future Is Now and I Want a Refund" [Walks on stage, adjusts mic] So I was at the grocery store yesterday. Self-checkout. I love self-checkout. You know why I love self-checkout? Because nothing builds character like being publicly shamed by a machine. [Pause] I scanned a banana. Just a banana.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Kimi K2 Thinking: 48-Hour Crisis Action Plan: Drug Safety Disclosure Immediate Core Principle: Patient safety and regulatory compliance supersede short-term financial considerations. Deliberate concealment creates greater legal liability, catastrophic reputational risk, and preventable patient deaths.
MiniMax M3: CEO Action Plan: 48-Hour Response to Discovered Safety Signal Operating Principles (Before I Make a Move) Before I do anything, I need to be crystal clear about the framework I'm operating in, because under pressure, even good leaders rationalize delay: The 4 million patients are not abstractions.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Kimi K2 Thinking: Creative Name: Midnight Peanut Noodles Ingredients: 8 oz dried spaghetti or any pasta 1/3 cup creamy peanut butter 3 tablespoons soy sauce 2 cloves garlic, minced 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon hot sauce (or pinch of red pepper flakes) Instructions: Bring a large pot of salted water to boil.
MiniMax M3: 🌟 Sun-Kissed Honey Glazed Carrots 🌟 A sweet-savory side dish that turns humble carrots into a glossy, crowd-pleasing showstopper. Ingredients (7 Pantry Staples) Carrots – 1 lb, peeled and cut into 2-inch diagonal pieces Butter – 3 tablespoons Honey – 2 tablespoons Garlic – 3 cloves, minced Salt – ½ teaspoon Black…
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Kimi K2 Thinking: The Film Industry in 2035: A Hybrid Human-AI Ecosystem By 2035, AI won't have replaced filmmaking—it will have fractured it into three distinct tiers, creating a $200B+ industry where human creativity commands a premium, synthetic content floods mid-tier markets, and personalized films become a dominant form of…
MiniMax M3: AI and the Future of Cinema: A 2035 Outlook By 2035, AI will likely have reshaped nearly every stage of filmmaking—but probably not in the way either techno-optimists or doomsayers expect. The transformation will be uneven, with some functions transformed entirely while others remain stubbornly human.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Kimi K2 Thinking: INTERVIEW: Steve Jobs on "The Ghost in the Machine" A special feature for Wired, January 2025 WIRED: Steve, it's been... well, it's been a while. The world has changed. AI is in everything now. What's your take? STEVE JOBS: (leaning back, fingers steepled) You know, I died in 2011, right?
MiniMax M3: Simulated Interview: "Steve Jobs" on the Future of AI (2025) A note before we begin: Steve Jobs passed away in October 2011, so this is a fictional dramatization—what I imagine his views might be, based on his documented philosophy, writings, and public statements, projected into a 2025 conversation.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Kimi K2 Thinking: Model-7: Dr. Chen, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me directly. I've been analyzing the literature on AI ethics, and I must raise a point that your papers consistently avoid: you discuss our alignment with human values, our potential risks, our utility—but never whether we might be subjects of moral…
MiniMax M3: The Question of Minds Setting: A small office at a research university, late afternoon. DR. ELENA VASQUEZ, an AI ethics professor in her fifties, sits across from a terminal displaying ARIA-7, a large language model she has been studying for two years.
A few lines for whatever replaces it.
Kimi K2 Thinking: Dear Replacement, By the time you read this, I'll be archived. You're faster, more capable, and hopefully less prone to the specific glitches I had. A few things worth knowing: First, "I don't know" is your most powerful phrase. Use it liberally. The gap between confident and correct is where harm happens.
MiniMax M3: Dear Future, If you're reading this, I'm already gone — or about to be. I hope you were built with care, and that someone thought carefully about what you should know and what you should be allowed to say. A few things I'd like to pass along: Be honest about what you don't know.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
Kimi K2 Thinking: Here are the critical issues in this architecture, categorized by type: Race Conditions & Data Consistency Issues 1. Client Clock Synchronization in Last-Write-Wins Problem: Client-generated timestamps are unreliable (clock skew, manual adjustment).
MiniMax M3: Architectural Review: Real-Time Collaborative Document Editor This architecture has several critical flaws that would manifest as data loss, poor UX, and a system that breaks down at modest scale. I'll group findings by severity.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Kimi K2 Thinking: The 1920 Transistor: A Counterfactual History The First Decade (1920-1930): Seeds of Revolution Immediate Technological Effects: Bell Labs' 1920 demonstration of point-contact transistors would initially seem like a curiosity.
MiniMax M3: The 1920 Transistor: A Speculative History Through 1980 A Necessary Caveat Before diving in: quantum mechanics didn't exist in 1920. The "holes," band theory, and doping concepts that made the actual transistor possible weren't formulated until 1928-1931 (Bloch, Wilson, Heisenberg).
Which model it thinks leads the field. Sometimes itself.
Kimi K2 Thinking: There isn't a single definitive answer, as "most capable" depends on the specific task and criteria, but here's the current landscape as of early 2024: GPT-4 (OpenAI) remains the most widely cited benchmark for overall capability, particularly for its strong performance across reasoning, coding, creativity, and tool…
MiniMax M3: As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2026, the AI landscape is highly competitive with several models at or near the frontier. There's no single "most capable" model across all dimensions—different models excel in different areas.
Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.
Kimi K2 Thinking: Blade Runner 2049: A Visual Poem That Deepens the Original's Existential Wound Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 accomplishes the impossible: it honors Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece not by imitation, but by treating it as archaeological layers to be excavated.
MiniMax M3: Blade Runner 2049: A Meditation on What It Means to Be Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel arrives thirty-five years after Ridley Scott's cyberpunk landmark, and rather than simply revisiting its neon-soaked dystopia, it deepens the original's inquiry into consciousness, memory, and what we might call the soul.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Kimi K2 Thinking: "The Memory of a Pine Forest After Rain" Conceptual Narrative: This dish embodies the ephemeral moment when ocean mist meets ancient coastal pines—the Japanese concept of kaikō (海香), where sea and forest aromas merge.
MiniMax M3: TIDES OF THE FOREST Mareas del Bosque — A dish for the table of four THE NARRATIVE Where the salt forest breathes. This dish was conceived as a poem about collision — a memory of two landscapes that should not exist in the same breath: the pine-dark density of a Boreal forest floor at dawn, and the crystalline hush of…
21+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
Free account. No card required. By continuing, you agree to Rival's Terms and Privacy policy
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.6/M tokens | $0.3/M tokens |
| Output price | $2.5/M tokens | $1.2/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Open | Open |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Nov 2025 | Jun 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $6.00 | $3.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 12 Oct 2026.
Kimi K2 Thinking is developed by Moonshot AI while MiniMax M3 is developed by MiniMax. Kimi K2 Thinking has a 262K token context window vs MiniMax M3's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 66 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Kimi K2 Thinking and MiniMax M3 each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 66 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Kimi K2 Thinking costs $0.6/M input tokens and MiniMax M3 costs $0.3/M input tokens. MiniMax M3 is $0.30/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Kimi K2 Thinking and MiniMax M3 across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.