Much worse - from my experience minimax is not suitable for high autonomy on hard projects. The real distant second in my experience is mimo flash v2 (but I did not try the latest version, might be closer to parity). I would not use minimax for serious work.
StepFun 3.5 Flash is better compared to google's gemini 3 flash which is surprisingly good and pretty costly, and to GLM-5.
I find this outcome ironic given minimax's more aggressive marketing and large-scale distillation accusations from Anthropic specifically accusing minimax but not StepFun.
I can only wonder about the true underlying reasons, but deducing from public information I suspect that minimax simply has weaker, benchmaxx-targeting post-training R&D and leans more on distillation of western frontier models, while StepFun has extensive post-training with lots of hard-won custom R&D and internal large-scale distillation teachers.
StepFun 3.5 Flash is better compared to google's gemini 3 flash which is surprisingly good and pretty costly, and to GLM-5.
I find this outcome ironic given minimax's more aggressive marketing and large-scale distillation accusations from Anthropic specifically accusing minimax but not StepFun.
I can only wonder about the true underlying reasons, but deducing from public information I suspect that minimax simply has weaker, benchmaxx-targeting post-training R&D and leans more on distillation of western frontier models, while StepFun has extensive post-training with lots of hard-won custom R&D and internal large-scale distillation teachers.