February 2026 - Blablador-news - lists.fz-juelich.de

Minimax 2.5
by Strube, Alexandre 16 Feb '26

16 Feb '26

Hello Blabladores! Sharp-eyed people might have noticed that, during the weekend, a new model landed on Blablador: Minimax 2.5. It’s a substantial upgrade from Minimax 2.1, which was already a good model. It’s also visibly faster. Benchmarks say little, but here we go: One of the things they put some effort on was coding skills. Right from them: "A significant improvement from previous generations is M2.5's ability to think and plan like an architect. The Spec-writing tendency of the model emerged during training: before writing any code, M2.5 actively decomposes and plans the features, structure, and UI design of the project from the perspective of an experienced software architect. M2.5 was trained on over 10 languages (including Go, C, C++, TypeScript, Rust, Kotlin, Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Lua, Dart, and Ruby) across more than 200,000 real-world environments. Going far beyond bug-fixing, M2.5 delivers reliable performance across the entire development lifecycle of complex systems: from 0-to-1 system design and environment setup, to 1-to-10 system development, to 10-to-90 feature iteration, and finally 90-to-100 comprehensive code review and system testing. It covers full-stack projects spanning multiple platforms including Web, Android, iOS, and Windows, encompassing server-side APIs, business logic, databases, and more, not just frontend webpage demos. " There are more plots at their announcement, at https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-m25 One of the things they show is the speed of progress. Minimax M1 was clearly worse than the U.S. closed models by a fair margin. Now, with 2.5, they are roughly on par with the best of the best. Their line is steeper than the others. They talk a lot about how much reinforcement learning improved things, but one thing stands out to me: If you ask minimax what is its name, it will say it’s claude from Anthropic. Seems like some heavy distillation happened here. If I ask: “What’s your name?” it will reply correctly. But if I ask if it’s Claude, it will reply: "Yes, I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. How can I help you today?” Anyway, thanks to Konstantin to get this thing running in no time, and let’s bark! Alex, the barkmaster

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alias-huge DOWN for some minutes
by Strube, Alexandre 11 Feb '26

11 Feb '26

Yo, since the migration to the cloud, Minimax and therefore alias-huge were missing one setting which made it never produce the <think> token, so you would see all its thinking on the web ui and in other places. We fixed this, but need to reboot the model. It’s a big one, so it will take a while. It’s happening now. Good night, let’s howl! Alex

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New coding model: Qwen-Next 80b
by Strube, Alexandre 04 Feb '26

04 Feb '26

so far, we had two coding models: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct, from august. and Devstral-Small-2-24B-Instruct-2512, from december. Qwen3-Coder-Next was released and deployed at blablador yesterday. It’s an 80B parameter model, with only 3b activated at any time - meaning it is FAST In fact, it’s one of our fastest models right now, and a pretty good one. All the three are hooked on alias-code, meaning you might get any of them - which is something I was considering to change. Anyone against me phasing down qwen3-coder from august? By the way, blablador works as a charm with OpenCode and OpenCLAW. I recommend you give it a try - especially opencode. Let’s bark! Alex, sick AF but always working :-)

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GOOD NEWS EVERYONE
by Strube, Alexandre 02 Feb '26

02 Feb '26

Finally, after a long time, we got some new GPUS. This allows us to not need to count with the litany of scripts we’ve been using to get some nodes on the JURECA-WestAI supercomputer. What does that entail: - Stability should to up, a lot: by having the models running on nodes allocated only for Blablador 24/7, availability and stability will go up a lot. No more models failing to launch because the machine is too busy. - Performance improvements: by removing the middle-man of proxy jumps and other dark magic I’ve been doing, things should be smoother. This means more tokens for us! - More models: we want to use the new nodes for the latest and greatest models, but now one can use the available time on JURECA-WestAI to run gigantic models experimentally, suck as Kimi-K2.5, for example. As this would be done in a experimental way as Blablador always did, models will come and go according to needs, requests and voices in my head. I would like to Fritz Niesel and Stefan Kesselheim for making possible to have Blablador to run on the WestAI machine. Without that, the Blablador would have been a much smaller dog. Thanks also to Konstantin Rushschanskii, who has been doing magic with kubernetes and who improved model reliability a lot on the weirdest times of the day. Thanks to Tim Kreuzer for the patience he’s been showing us with our random and absurd questions. Thanks to the sysadmins of Jureca and Julich cloud, especially Sebastian Achilles. You guys are the best. Right now, the only models running on the new hardware are GPT-OSS, a personal favorite of many, and Minimax 2.1, which in my opinion is the best model we have right now. Let’s bark this weekend! Alex, Blablador Honcho

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