MiniMax M3: Master 1M-Token Long Context With MSA

On June 1, 2026 MiniMax shipped M3, and over the following ten days the part developers actually care about landed: the technical report and the open weights. M3 is the first open-weight model to combine frontier coding, native multimodal input, and a genuine 1-million-token context window in a single checkpoint. The thing making it spike across r/LocalLLaMA, Hacker News, and dev Twitter right now is not another benchmark bar chart. It is MSA, MiniMax Sparse Attention, the architecture that makes that 1M window cheap enough to use in production.