Noometry

Model comparison

Mercury 2 vs MiniMax-M3

MiniMax-M3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.8 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 15 shared benchmarks.

Mercury 2 Inception

39.1

Rank #175 Confirmed

MiniMax-M3 MiniMax

43.8

Rank #85 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 15 benchmarks with published results for both. Mercury 2 scores higher in 0 categories and MiniMax-M3 in 7 categories; 7 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in knowledge, where MiniMax-M3 leads 58.4 to 36.2.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is SciCode: 38.7% for Mercury 2 and 47.1% for MiniMax-M3.
  • Mercury 2 is cheaper at $0.25 / $0.75 per million input/output tokens, against $0.30 / $1.20 for MiniMax-M3.
  • MiniMax-M3 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 128K.
  • MiniMax-M3 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Mercury 2MiniMax-M3
ProviderInceptionMiniMax
Noometry Index39.143.8
Released2026-02-202026-06-01
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window128K1M
Max output50K512K
Input $ / M tokens$0.25$0.30
Output $ / M tokens$0.75$1.20
Results tracked1741

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Category by category

Coding MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 33.5 (#255), MiniMax-M3: 41.8 (#118)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena WebDev11711482
SciCode38.7%47.1%
LMArena Coding13911469
ALE-Bench785.58640.02
FrontierCode—14.7%
WeirdML43.2%—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, MiniMax-M3: 22.6 (#130)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
APEX-Agents—37.7%
OSWorld 2.0—4.6%
GBAEval—0.9%
Vending-Bench 2—2,158

Reasoning MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 23.8 (#170), MiniMax-M3: 30.1 (#87)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
CritPt0.8%3.7%
LMArena Hard Prompts13621447
SimpleBench—45.8%
NYT Connections (extended)—65.1%
Chess Puzzles—14%
Mystery Game Puzzles—8%
DTBench—78.9%
LMCA—33.7%
Surface Evolver Bench—55%
Epoch Capabilities Index—146.95
ForecastBench—61.4

Math Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, MiniMax-M3: 40.0 (#95)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025—71.1%
ProofBench—18%
LMArena Math—1429

Knowledge MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 36.2 (#172), MiniMax-M3: 58.4 (#35)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena Expert13581461
GPQA Diamond—90.9%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.3%—

Multimodal Not comparable

Mercury 2: —, MiniMax-M3: 40.2 (#51)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena Vision—1253
LMArena Document—1435

Multilingual MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 46.6 (#157), MiniMax-M3: 53.0 (#75)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena Non-English13311420
LMArena Chinese14171463
LMArena Russian13041428
LMArena French—1447
LMArena German—1426
LMArena Japanese—1381
LMArena Korean—1372
LMArena Spanish—1432

Instruction Following MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 70.2 (#165), MiniMax-M3: 75.5 (#62)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena Instruction Following13291433

Long Context MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 40.5 (#154), MiniMax-M3: 44.2 (#72)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena Longer Query13301445

Writing & Preference MiniMax-M3 leads

Mercury 2: 53.8 (#155), MiniMax-M3: 62.1 (#83)

BenchmarkMercury 2MiniMax-M3
LMArena Text13551433
LMArena Creative Writing12891404
LMArena Multi-Turn13581442
EQ-Bench 4—1150

Frequently asked questions

Is Mercury 2 better than MiniMax-M3?

MiniMax-M3 is the stronger model overall, scoring 43.8 to 39.1 on the Noometry Index.

Which is cheaper, Mercury 2 or MiniMax-M3?

Mercury 2 is cheaper. It lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens; MiniMax-M3 lists at $0.30 and $1.20.

Is Mercury 2 or MiniMax-M3 better for coding?

MiniMax-M3 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 41.8 versus 33.5 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

MiniMax-M3 does, with 1M tokens against 128K.

How many benchmarks do Mercury 2 and MiniMax-M3 share?

15 benchmarks have published results for both models. Mercury 2 has 17 scored results on Noometry and MiniMax-M3 has 41.

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