MiniMax M2.1 vs Qwen2 72B Instruct

MiniMax

MiniMax M2.1, released by MiniMax on December 23, 2025, is a large language model with approximately 230 billion parameters featuring strong multi-language programming capabilities and an industry-leading multilingual coding profile. It features a 196K token context window and is optimized for complex real-world software engineering tasks across Rust, Java, Golang, C++, TypeScript, and other languages. M2.1 targets agentic coding workflows and applications requiring production-grade programming across diverse language environments.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2-72B-Instruct is a 72-billion-parameter language model released by Alibaba's Qwen team in June 2024, serving as the flagship of the Qwen2 generation and representing a major step in open-weight multilingual modeling. Trained on data spanning 30+ languages with strong coverage of code and structured reasoning, the model was among the first openly released 70B-class models to demonstrate competitive performance across diverse benchmarks. It established the foundation architecture and training methodology that the Qwen2.5 series would later extend.