AIHubMix Blog

Announcements, tutorials, model analysis, and product updates from AIHubMix.

MiniMax M3.1 Flash vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Claude Haiku 5.5: One Bug Fix, Three Bills

Three cheap coding models shipped within four weeks of each other: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (with its 1017 update), Claude Haiku 5.5, and MiniMax M3.1 Flash, which spent its first week as the anonymous Space Bunny. All three have a 1M-token context window and cost between $0.10 and $0.17 per million input tokens. So which one should you use for routine coding? AIHubMix gave all three the same bug fix, three times each, through one API key. Each model fixed the bug correctly every time, but the bill

October 19, 20267 min readOpinion

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  MiniMax M3.1 Flash Effort Levels: Why the Default Cost 7× Low on the Same Bug Fix

  MiniMax M3.1 Flash has five thinking levels and no off switch. If you don't pick a level, the model picks the deepest one for you. MiniMax's text generation guide says effort "defaults to max when omitted." That default is expensive in a way that's easy to miss. AIHubMix ran the same two-bug fix at every level. The default used about 10× the thinking tokens of low and took about 6× as long, and every run at every level passed all 215 tests. The model's thinking cost rose with the effort settin

  October 19, 20267 min readTutorial
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  Moving Off MiniMax M2.5/M2.7 Before Nov 18: Fixing M3.1 Flash's "requires adaptive thinking" 400

  MiniMax is retiring M2.5 and M2.7 on 18 November 2026, and the switch has already started. Since 19 October, the two older families have been closed to new users, and plan requests that name them are served by M3.1 Flash. If you're on pay-as-you-go, you have four weeks to change the model ID yourself. Most M2.7 code runs on M3.1 Flash unchanged. The trouble comes from one design choice: M3.1 Flash always thinks, and it thinks at the deepest level unless you say otherwise. That produces one lou

  October 19, 20269 min readTutorial
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  MiniMax M3.1 Flash Is Space Bunny: What Changed from M2.7 and M3, and What It Costs

  In late September, a model with no maker's name on it topped OpenRouter's daily chart, ahead of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and stayed OpenCode's most-used model for five days straight. It was listed as Space Bunny Alpha, and it was free. That model was MiniMax M3.1 Flash. As of 19 October 2026 you can call it per token on AIHubMix as minimax-m3.1-flash, at $0.165 per million input tokens and $0.66 per million output tokens. The short version: * It replaces M2.7. Starting 19 October, MiniMax sends

  October 19, 20268 min readNews
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  How to Set Up Codex config.toml: Custom API, Proxy, and Common Errors

  Codex keeps its settings in one file, config.toml: which model to use, which API to call, and how much the agent may do without asking. The format changed several times in 2026, and many guides from earlier in the year show settings that now stop Codex from starting. This guide gives you a working config first, then the parts most people change: profiles, project settings, the sandbox, and a proxy. At the end is a list of the errors you're likely to see, with what each one means. Checked again

  October 19, 20267 min readTutorial
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  DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs V4 Pro: Is the Flash Enough Now?

  DeepSeek's lineup has an odd shape this autumn. V4 Pro 0813 is the bigger, pricier model: at peak hours its output costs $3.96 per 1M tokens, 3.3 times the Flash's $1.20. But the Flash has been retrained twice since Pro's August release, and the October 17 update, V4.1 Flash 1017, now outscores Pro on every agentic and coding benchmark DeepSeek publishes for both. So is there any coding or agent task left where Pro is worth the premium? By DeepSeek's own numbers, very few. Pro keeps a narrow l

  October 19, 20266 min readOpinion
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  DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs Claude Haiku 5.5: Which Cheap Model for Terminal Coding Agents?

  Ten days apart, the two cheapest serious agent models of October 2026 arrived from opposite directions. Anthropic shipped Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7 at $0.10 input and $0.50 output per 1M tokens, pitched as the subagent that sits under Sonnet and Opus. DeepSeek answered on October 17 with V4.1 Flash 1017, an update aimed squarely at end-to-end coding work. The decision comes down to one task: a terminal coding session in Claude Code, where the agent reads files, runs tests, and edits code o

  October 19, 20267 min readOpinion
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  Migrating to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017: The reasoning_content 400, the Silent Alias Swap, and Peak-Hour Billing

  Most migrations start with changing a model name. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 did it the other way round: on October 17, 2026, DeepSeek kept the name deepseek-flash and changed the model behind it. Anyone calling deepseek-flash, deepseek-v4-flash, or deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp on DeepSeek's API was moved over without touching a line of code. On AIHubMix the new checkpoint has its own ID, deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017, so you choose when to move. Either way, these are the problems to check: Prob

  October 19, 20269 min readTutorial
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  DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017: Same Price, Shorter Outputs, and AIHubMix vs OpenRouter Pricing

  On Saturday, October 17, 2026, DeepSeek swapped the model behind its deepseek-flash API name for a new checkpoint, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017. The price did not move, the context window did not move, and the calling method did not move. What changed is the model: DeepSeek reports double-digit gains on terminal and program-building benchmarks, and says the new checkpoint finishes tasks faster with shorter outputs. The short answer: if you run coding agents or tool-heavy workflows on the September

  October 19, 202610 min readNews
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  Qwen3.8 Max Free vs Qwen3.8 Flash Free: Is Flash Enough?

  For most everyday work, yes. Chat, drafting, extraction, summaries and in-editor coding help all run fine on Qwen3.8 Flash, which answers in seconds and, on Qwen's own numbers, sits within about a point of Max on office tasks and graduate-level science questions. Max earns its longer wait on two kinds of work: hard expert-level reasoning and multi-file coding, where Qwen's own numbers show the widest gaps. It also suits jobs you'd run in the background anyway. While both are free on AIHubMix,

  October 16, 20265 min readOpinion
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  Free Qwen3.8 Max and Flash API on AIHubMix: Limits, End Date, and Your First Call

  Alibaba's flagship Qwen3.8 Max and its fast sibling Qwen3.8 Flash are free to call on AIHubMix right now. The free model IDs are qwen3.8-max-free and qwen3.8-flash-free, and both cost $0 per million tokens for input and output. GMI Cloud is funding the campaign. It went live on October 14, 2026 (Pacific Time) and runs for 30 days, so until around November 13, or until the campaign credits run out, whichever comes first. The free IDs follow the same rules as every other AIHubMix free model: 10

  October 16, 20266 min readNews