MiniMax M3 vs Sakana Fugu Ultra

Pick Sakana Fugu Ultra if you want the stronger benchmark profile. MiniMax M3 only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Sakana Fugu Ultra is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 100 to 78. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Sakana Fugu Ultra's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 83.5 against 67. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 66% to 82.1%.

Sakana Fugu Ultra is also the more expensive model on tokens at $5.00 input / $30.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens for MiniMax M3. That is roughly 25.0x on output cost alone. Sakana Fugu Ultra is the reasoning model in the pair, while MiniMax M3 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use.