MiniMax M2.1 is Free in Kilo for a Limited Time
Try the new 230B parameter model for any coding task
What better way to start the new year than with another free AI coding model in Kilo? We are excited to announce that MiniMax-M2.1 is now available to use for FREE in Kilo Code.
Popular OSS lab MiniMax is phasing out the free version of their previous model, M2, which has been trending at #5 in Code Mode in Kilo for several weeks now. As a special new years gift to our users, they're offering M2.1, a faster and more powerful upgrade, free for anybody to use in Kilo for a limited time.
Check it out and let us know what you think!
The Future is Open
This release marks a significant moment for open-weight models. MiniMax M2.1 generated almost 200k downloads on Hugging Face and has generated serious buzz in the developer community.
With its massive token context window and efficient Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture (230B total parameters with only 10B active), it has been hailed by some early adopters as a potential “RAG Killer.”
Developers are reporting that M2.1 punches well above its weight class, delivering coding performance that rivals top-tier proprietary models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 3 Pro, particularly in web and mobile app development tasks. Code Arena has been comparing M2.1 against top SOTA models. Its high scores on the VIBE and SWE-bench benchmarks back up these claims, proving that open-source models are no longer just catching up—they are competing at the frontier.
This shift aligns perfectly with what we’ve been seeing at Kilo. Chinese open-weight models are getting exponentially better. As we noted in our recent blog post on the LLM Convergence:
“OSS models have started to close the gap with SOTA models. How might we track what comes next?”
MiniMax M2.1 is exactly “what comes next.”
It represents a new tier of accessibility and power for developers who want state-of-the-art reasoning without the proprietary lock-in. And the focus on multi-lingual capabilities shows an embrace of developer communities around the world.
In our own testing detailed in our MiniMax M2.1 deep dive, we found it to be a powerhouse for agentic workflows. As we highlighted, this model is made for real-world development, excelling at complex debugging and multi-step reasoning.
Starting today, you can experience this performance firsthand in Kilo without denting your AI coding budget at all. Whether you are refactoring legacy code, running a super-fast code review, or building something new in Kilo’s App Builder, MiniMax-M2.1 is ready to work.
We’re committed to hosting a range of free models on Kilo and grateful to MiniMax for helping that happen.
Try M2.1 in Kilo today!