alt Hacker NewsMiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
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It feels suspicious that MiMo-V2.6 Pro gets 46 in de index while DeepSeek-V4.1 (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash) gets 39. According to the appendix at the bottom of https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimo-v2-6 the deepseek model sometimes surpasses mimo and it's not so far behind in capabilities. A week ago opus 5 appeared 1 points ahead of fable 5 despite fable being a much smarter model (this has been corrected already)
It is an impressive model. Agreed on most that is written on this page, with the exception of it being fast. I ran it on my own LLM benchmark suite[1] and it is faster than DeepSeek but still much slower than leading models. But it's pricing is where it really shines.
KillSwitch-Bench 1.0
Claude Opus 5 66.9
GPT-6 Astra 57.9
Claude Fable 5.1 46.7
MiMo-V2.6-Pro 38.8
Muse Spark 1.3 36.5
Mimo2.5 is really good, but tended to loop too much for my taste. Locally, Pro2.5 wasn't much better. I would reach for it for one shots, hopefully they sorted it out with v2.6, it's a model that's slept on by many. I found that most people that used it did so because it was free. It's a top model worth exploring if you have never given it a go.
Why is it labelled as #1/114 for artificial intelligence (at the top of the page) but if you scroll down and look at the graphs it's obviously not?
"When evaluating the Intelligence Index, it generated 140M tokens, which is somewhat verbose in comparison to the median of 140M."
Per Xiaomi, MiMo v2.6 training run cost $3.47m. A far cry from the estimated costs ($100m+) for the Big 5 (MSL, xAI, GDM, OAI, Ant). I wouldn't be surprised if salaries and R&D costs have similar drastic disparities.
For a model that matches Muse Spark 1.3 in benchmarks, MiMo v2.6 Pro is incredibly cheap, given its cache rates will remain $0.0036 per million.
OpenAI usage limits have been severely cut, and intelligence appears to be markedly declining, so I'm going to start trying these Chinese models seriously now. I don't mind if it takes longer. I just need the intelligence to predictably work the same way from day to day.