MiniMax M3 Ranks #4 Overall on Design Arena With 1319 Elo

MiniMax M3, the newly released open-weights model from Chinese AI company MiniMax (@MiniMax_AI), has landed at #4 overall on the open-weights leaderboard of the design-focused benchmark Design Arena, posting an Elo rating of 1319. The figure was announced by Design Arena (@Designarena) on June 2, 2026, marking a 35-Elo improvement over the previous M2.7.

The score places M3 in the same performance band as GLM 5.1 (@Zai_org), Kimi K.26 (@Kimi_Moonshot), and MiMo-V2.5 Pro (@XiaomiMiMo). A follow-up post on Design Arena emphasized that M3 is positioned as the first open-weights model supporting coding, agentic and multimodal capabilities together.

MiniMax formally released M3 around June 1, 2026 via API, with weights and a technical report due within roughly ten days of launch (see the official blog and an apidog explainer). The evaluation venue, Design Arena, is a Y Combinator S25 crowdsourced benchmark that ranks design outputs—UI, Website, 3D Design, Data Visualization—via Elo ratings derived from real user votes. Unlike text-centric benchmarks, it emphasizes look, usability and aesthetics, and Y Combinator notes participation from over 50,000 users across more than 140 countries.