MINIMAX:
Chinese AI startup MiniMax, backed by Alibaba and Tencent, has launched three new models it claims rival the capabilities of industry leaders like OpenAI. The models, MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and T2A-01-HD, aim to compete with advanced systems developed by U.S. tech giants.
MiniMax-Text-01 is a text-only model with 456 billion parameters, boasting superior performance over models like Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash on benchmarks such as MMLU and SimpleQA, which assess a model’s ability to solve math problems and answer factual questions. The model’s large size allows it to outperform many others, with its context window of 4 million tokens enabling it to process around 3 million words in one go—significantly larger than GPT-4‘s context window.
MiniMax-VL-01, a multimodal model, understands both text and images and competes with models like Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on tasks involving graphs and diagrams. However, it falls short compared to models like GPT-4o and InternVL2.5 on certain tests. Meanwhile, T2A-01-HD is an audio generation model optimized for speech, capable of generating synthetic voices in 17 languages and cloning voices from just 10 seconds of audio.
While T2A-01-HD is available exclusively via MiniMax’s API, the other models can be accessed through GitHub and platforms like Hugging Face. However, these models are not entirely open-source. MiniMax has restricted access to certain components and enforces a license prohibiting developers from using the models to improve competing AI systems.
MiniMax, founded in 2021 by former SenseTime employees, also faces controversy over some of its products. Its Talkie app, featuring AI avatars of public figures like Donald Trump and Taylor Swift, was pulled from the Apple App Store for unspecified reasons, and iQiyi, a Chinese streaming service, has filed a lawsuit against MiniMax, accusing it of using their copyrighted content to train its models.
The release of these models comes amid increased scrutiny from the Biden administration, which has proposed stricter export rules for Chinese AI companies. If enacted, these rules would impose tighter restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips and models needed to develop sophisticated AI systems.
