Interleaved-thinking model tuned for tool use, at a tenth of frontier price.
MiniMax M2 thinks between tool calls rather than only before them, which makes it unusually good at the messy loops real agents run. The same lab ships strong video and voice models, so a single vendor covers reasoning, image-to-video and speech.
Best for
Recommended workflow
Step 1
Test on your hardest agent trace
Step 2
Enable interleaved thinking
Step 3
Route only failures to a frontier model
OpenAI
The default consumer AI; GPT-5.5 reasoning + agents + image.
Anthropic
Best long-context reasoning, writing, and Artifacts.
Native Workspace integration, 2M-token context, Veo + Imagen built in.
xAI
Real-time X data + uncensored research; fastest at breaking news.
Meta
Best open-weight family; self-host for privacy and price.
Mistral AI
European, multilingual, GDPR-friendly frontier model.