MiniMax is an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI) company based in

Shanghai Shanghai, Shanghainese: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: is a direct-administered municipality and the most populous urban area in China. The city is located on the Chinese shoreline on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the ...

, China. As of 2024, it has been dubbed one of China's "AI Tiger" companies by investors.

Background

MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by several

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

veterans from

SenseTime SenseTime is a partly state-owned publicly traded artificial intelligence company headquartered in Hong Kong. The company develops technologies including facial recognition, image recognition, object detection, optical character recognition, med ...

. When it first started out, it received funding from

MiHoYo MiHoYo Co., Ltd. is a Chinese Video game development studio, video game development and publishing company founded in 2012 and headquartered in Shanghai. The company is best known for developing the ''Honkai'' franchise, ''Tears of Themis'', '' ...

. In March 2024,

Alibaba Group Alibaba Group Holding Limited, branded as Alibaba (), is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology company specializing in E-commerce in China, e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded on 28 June 1999 in Hangzho ...

led a $600 million financing round for MiniMax giving it a valuation of $2.5 billion. Other investors of MiniMax include

Hillhouse Investment Hillhouse Investment Management Ltd. is a global private equity firm with an East Asian heritage. Hillhouse was founded by Lei Zhang in 2005 with initial seed capital from the Yale University endowment and invests across East Asia, Southeast A ...

HongShan HongShan Capital Group (HSG; ) is a Chinese venture capital firm founded in 2005. It was previously the China investment arm of Sequoia Capital (Sequoia) and was known as Sequoia Capital China and Sequoia China before it was rebranded and spun- ...

IDG Capital IDG Capital is an investment and asset management firm, headquartered in Beijing, that specializes in venture capital, private equity, and mergers & acquisitions. History The firm, founded in 1992, was an early investor of Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, ...

and

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. ( zh, s=腾讯, p=Téngxùn) is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology Conglomerate (company), conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimed ...

. In October 2024, it was reported Chinese phone makers opted for Minimax with regards to its foundational AI large models.

Products

Talkie

MiniMax's first product was Glow which was launched in October 2022. The app allowed users to create virtual characters, give them background stories and then chat with them about various topics. Only four months after launch, the app had over 5 million users. Due to filing issues, Glow was terminated in March 2023. Glow was relaunched under two new brands: Talkie, launched for international markets in June 2023, and Xing Ye (), introduced in September 2023 for the Chinese market. Talkie was profiled ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'' in July 2024. For June 2024 Talkie ranked fifth among the most-downloaded free entertainment apps in the U.S. More than half of Talkie's 11 million monthly active users were in the U.S. Other popular markets included Philippines, the U.K. and Canada. Talkie offered AI-generated conversations with people such as

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...

Taylor Swift Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. Known for her autobiographical songwriting, artistic versatility, and Cultural impact of Taylor Swift, cultural impact, Swift is one of the Best selling artists, w ...

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

and

LeBron James LeBron Raymone James Sr. ( ; born December 30, 1984) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Nicknamed "King James", he is the NBA's all-time leading scorer and ...

Hailuo AI

In March 2024, MiniMax launched Hailuo AI, a multimodal

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

consumer platform that provides AI text and music-generating features. In September 2024, MiniMax launched video-01, a text-to-video model under Hailuo AI. A review by Tom's Guide stated it roughly equivalent to Luma Labs Dream Machine but not as good as

Runway In aviation, a runway is an elongated, rectangular surface designed for the landing and takeoff of an aircraft. Runways may be a human-made surface (often asphalt concrete, asphalt, concrete, or a mixture of both) or a natural surface (sod, ...

Gen-3. In December 2024, ''

Broadcast Broadcasting is the data distribution, distribution of sound, audio audiovisual content to dispersed audiences via a electronic medium (communication), mass communications medium, typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum (radio waves), ...

'' reported that Hailuo AI can reproduce the logos of British television channels

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...

, Channel 5, and ITV in its AI-generated videos. On 20 January 2025, MiniMax launched audio functions for Hailuo AI. On 28 January 2025, MiniMax release the Model T2V-01-Director and I2V-01-Director, is the latest addition to the Hailuo AI Video-01 Model family, are designed to revolutionize video creation by putting professional filmmaking tools at fingertips. T2V-01-Director and I2V-01-Director introduce a significant reduction in movement randomness, ensuring that every frame adheres strictly to creative intent. This heightened level of control allows for more accurate and nuanced storytelling.

Technology

On 17 April 2024, MiniMax officially launched the ABAB 6.5 series, a

mixture of experts Mixture of experts (MoE) is a machine learning technique where multiple expert networks (learners) are used to divide a problem space into homogeneous regions. MoE represents a form of ensemble learning. They were also called committee machines. ...

language model. In January 2025, Minimax unveiled the MiniMax-01

(LLM) family, which includes a general-purpose foundational model, the MiniMax-Text-01, and the multimodal MiniMax-VL-01 with visual capabilities. In April 2025, Minimax released Speech-02, a new

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...

model. It supports over 30 languages and can process up to 200,000 characters at once. In June 2025, Minimax released MiniMax-M1, "the world's first open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model". It supports a context length of 1 million tokens, and the lightning attention mechanism in MiniMax-M1 enables efficient scaling of test-time compute – For example, compared to DeepSeek R1, M1 consumes 25% of the FLOPs at a generation length of 100K tokens.

References

External links

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MiniMax - Hailuo AI

MiniMax - Talkie

MiniMax - API Platform

MiniMax Audio

MiniMax AI Chatbot
{{Authority control 2021 establishments in Shanghai 2021 establishments in China Artificial intelligence companies Chinese brands Companies based in Shanghai Text-to-video generation