# MiniMax M2 (230B)

> MiniMax's flagship returns to full attention and looks like a leaner, sparser cousin of Qwen3.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | MiniMax (China) |
| Released | 2025-10-23 |
| Decoder type | Sparse MoE |
| Family | Sparse MoE |
| Scale | 230B total, 10B active (4.3% active) |
| Context window | 196,608 tokens |
| Attention | GQA with QK-Norm and partial RoPE |
| Layer mix | 62 GQA |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 248 KiB (High) |
| License | Modified MIT License |

**Key detail:** Uses per-layer QK-Norm, much sparser MoE routing than Qwen3, and MTP during training.

## Architecture concepts

- [QK-Norm (QK-Norm)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/qk-norm.md): RMSNorm applied to queries and keys before attention to keep logits well-behaved.
- [Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/gqa.md): Several query heads share one key/value head, shrinking the KV cache with little quality loss.
- [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/moe.md): Many feed-forward experts, but a router sends each token to only a few of them.
- [Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/mtp.md): Extra heads learn to predict several future tokens, and can draft tokens at inference.

## Benchmark (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index)

- AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: total 18.6 (Scientific 7.3)

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/minimax-m2-230b.webp
- View in article: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/the-big-llm-architecture-comparison#%C2%A7131-per-layer-qk-norm
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2/blob/main/config.json
- Tech report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26494
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-minimax-m2-230b
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/minimax-m2-230b/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/minimax-m2-230b.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._