MiniMax (company)
In plain wordsA Shanghai artificial intelligence company, founded in 2021, that makes AI companion apps, the Hailuo video generator and large language models, several released openly.
A Shanghai company whose products range from large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. and speech, music and video generators to consumer chat apps, and which press coverage counts among China's 'AI tigers'. Its Talkie and Xingye character-chat apps made it a major AI companionAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship. provider, including outside China, and its Hailuo AI platform drew international users for video generationtext-to-video model, n.: An AI that creates a short video clip — increasingly with matching sound — from a written description, such as 'a paper boat sailing down a rainy street'.; in September 2025 Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery sued it in the United States, alleging that Hailuo generated their copyrighted characters. Its MiniMax-01 models (January 2025) combined linear 'lightning' attention with standard attentionattention, n.: A way for an AI model to choose what to focus on. For each word it processes, the model scores how relevant every other word is and draws information mostly from the relevant ones. layers to handle very long contexts, and its later M-series models, several released as open weightsopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private., target reasoning, coding and agent tasks.
Origin
Founded in December 2021 in Shanghai by former researchers from the computer-vision company SenseTime, with Yan Junjie as chief executive; Alibaba and Tencent are among its investors. Its shares began trading in Hong Kong on 9 January 2026, a day after those of Zhipu AIZhipu AI, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company that grew out of Tsinghua University and makes the GLM family of language models. Outside China it uses the name Z.ai..
Usage note
Not to be confused with minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best., the decision rule for two-player games.
Related
- Zhipu AIZhipu AI, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company that grew out of Tsinghua University and makes the GLM family of language models. Outside China it uses the name Z.ai.
- Moonshot AIMoonshot AI, prop. n.: A Beijing artificial intelligence company, founded in 2023, that makes the Kimi chatbot and very large models that anyone can download.
- DeepSeekDeepSeek, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company whose free, cheaply trained models startled the world in January 2025 by nearly matching the best American systems.
- AI companionAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship.
- text-to-video modeltext-to-video model, n.: An AI that creates a short video clip — increasingly with matching sound — from a written description, such as 'a paper boat sailing down a rainy street'.
- open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private.
- minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best.