Chinese AI firm MiniMax releases new fashions it claims are aggressive with the business’s finest


Chinese companies proceed to launch AI fashions that rival the capabilities of programs developed by OpenAI and different U.S.-based AI corporations.

This week, MiniMax, an Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup that has raised round $850 million in enterprise capital and is valued at greater than $2.5 billion, debuted three new fashions: MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and T2A-01-HD. MiniMax-Text-01 is a text-only mannequin, whereas MiniMax-VL-01 can perceive each photographs and textual content. T2A-01-HD, in the meantime, generates audio — particularly speech.

MiniMax claims that MiniMax-Text-01, which is 456 billion parameters in dimension, performs higher than fashions reminiscent of Google’s not too long ago unveiled Gemini 2.0 Flash on benchmarks like MATH and SimpleQA, which measure the flexibility of a mannequin to reply math issues and fact-based questions. Parameters roughly correspond to a mannequin’s problem-solving abilities, and fashions with extra parameters usually carry out higher than these with fewer parameters.

As for MiniMax-VL-01, MiniMax says that it rivals Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on evaluations that require multimodal understanding, like ChartQA, which duties fashions with answering graph- and diagram-related queries (e.g., “What is the height worth of the orange line on this graph?”). Granted, MiniMax-VL-01 doesn’t fairly finest Gemini 2.0 Flash on many of those assessments. OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama 3.1 beat it on a number of as nicely.

Of notice, MiniMax-Text-01 has an especially massive context window. A mannequin’s context, or context window, refers to enter (e.g., textual content) {that a} mannequin considers earlier than producing output (further textual content). With a context window of 4 million tokens, MiniMax-Text-01 can analyze round 3 million phrases in a single go — or simply over 5 copies of “War and Peace.”

For context (no pun supposed), MiniMax-Text-01’s context window is roughly 31 occasions the scale of GPT-4o’s and Llama 3.1’s.

The final of MiniMax’s fashions launched this week, T2A-01-HD, is an audio generator optimized for speech. T2A-01-HD can generate an artificial voice with adjustable cadence, tone, and tenor in round 17 totally different languages, together with English and Chinese, and clone a voice from simply 10 seconds of an audio recording.

MiniMax didn’t publish benchmark outcomes evaluating T2A-01-HD to different audio-generating fashions. But to this reporter’s ear, T2A-01-HD’s outputs sound on par with audio fashions from Meta and startups like PlayAI.

With the exception of T2A-01-HD, which is solely obtainable by way of MiniMax’s API and Hailuo AI platform, MiniMax’s new fashions might be downloaded from GitHub and the AI dev platform Hugging Face.

Just as a result of the fashions are “overtly” obtainable doesn’t imply they aren’t locked down in sure points, nevertheless. MiniMax-Text-01 and MiniMax-VL-01 aren’t really open supply within the sense that MiniMax hasn’t launched the parts (e.g., coaching information) wanted to re-create them from scratch. Moreover, they’re below MiniMax’s restrictive license, which prohibits builders from utilizing the fashions to enhance rival AI fashions and requires that platforms with greater than 100 million month-to-month lively customers request a particular license from MiniMax.

MiniMax was based in 2021 by former staff of SenseTime, one among China’s largest AI companies. The firm’s initiatives embrace apps like Talkie, an AI-powered role-playing platform alongside the strains of Character AI, and text-to-video fashions that MiniMax has launched in Hailuo.

Some of MiniMax’s merchandise have turn out to be the topic of minor controversy.

Talkie, which was pulled from Apple’s App Store in December for unspecified “technical” causes, options AI avatars of public figures, together with Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, and LeBron James, none of whom seem to have consented to being featured within the app.

In December, Broadcast journal reported that MiniMax’s video mills can reproduce the logos of British tv channels, suggesting that MiniMax’s fashions had been skilled on content material from these channels. And MiniMax is reportedly being sued by iQiyi, a Chinese video streaming service that alleges MiniMax illicitly skilled on iQiyi’s copyrighted recordings.

MiniMax’s new fashions arrive days after the outgoing Biden administration proposed harsher export guidelines and restrictions on AI applied sciences for Chinese ventures. Companies in China had been already prevented from shopping for superior AI chips, but when the brand new guidelines go into impact as written, corporations might be confronted with stricter caps on each the semiconductor tech and fashions wanted to bootstrap subtle AI programs.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration introduced further measures targeted on maintaining subtle chips out of China. Chip foundries and packaging corporations that wish to export sure chips might be subjected to broader license necessities until they train higher scrutiny and due diligence to forestall their merchandise from reaching Chinese purchasers.



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