MiniMax received a new round of financing, against the backdrop where AI large model competition in China continues to intensify.
Recently, there were media reports that MiniMax, a startup project of general language model, is undergoing a new round of large-scale financing, with Alibaba as the leading investor. Previously Minimax has completed multiple rounds of financing. In January 2022, MiniMax completed angel round financing. In July 2022, MiniMax completed the Pre-A round of financing, with investors including MiHoYo and IDG Capital. In June 2023, according to Reuters, Minimax completed a new round of $250 million financing, with the overall valuation reaching above $1.2 billion. Industry analysis indicates that the company currently ranks first in a series of evaluations such as the Chinese universal large model benchmark.
MiniMax was founded in December 2021 by Yan Junjie, former vice president of SenseTime and vice president of SenseTime Research Institute. In March 2023, MiniMax released a large language model technology platform for B-end users. In August 2023, the MiniMax large model became fully open to the public and can be used for varied scenarios such as logical reasoning, text continuation, copywriting, and code generation. In January, this year, MiniMax released its latest model abab6. This is the first large language model based on the MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture in China, and is equipped with the ability to handle complex tasks with large parameters.
Prior to investing in MiniMax, Alibaba also invested heavily in the field of AI models, including Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI and Moonshot Al. Not long ago, Moonshot Al completed a new round of financing, with Alibaba investing $800 million, becoming its major outside shareholder. Ushering into 2024, Alibaba's AI strategyhas apparently gone more aggressive, with frequent moves and a significant increase in investment. Now, Alibaba has reached to all the leading domestic large models, which may lay a foundation for Alibaba Cloud's competition in the AGI era.
After the launch of ChatGPT, the global large-scale model industry officially kicked off its vigorous development in 2023. The industry now regards AI large model ecosystem as a key to upgrading technology and expanding applications. Based on this consensus, in the past year, in China the competition for large models has emerged as well, with multiple models being launched and provided to the public. At present, the landscape of the domestic industry has begun to come into shape. How to maintain competitive edges may thus become an increasingly important issue for all participants in this round of technological revolution.