Another Chinese AI startup is threatening to challenge the power of U.S. tech with the launch of a new world-leading open model.
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Following in the footsteps of Chinese peer DeepSeek earlier this year, AI startup MiniMax has reportedly released its new M2 model with an “unprecedented intelligence” score for an open model.
Mixture of Experts
According to an article in the South China Morning Post, the M2 is now among the top 5 global models in the Artificial Analysis intelligence index.
That not only gets praise from Mum but is a threat to U.S. tech with its score surpassing Alphabet (GOOGL) – owned Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which was released earlier this year, and just below models from U.S. companies OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.
Alphabet stock was flat in pre-market trading.
With 200 billion parameters, MiniMax M2 adopts the so-called Mixture-of-Experts architecture, which analysts say has significantly enhanced the efficiency of Chinese AI models over the past year.
The model activates only 10 billion of those parameters for each “forward pass” – the process of input data handling – to boost efficiencies.
Agentic Boost
MiniMax said M2 excels in reasoning through complex agentic tasks, making it particularly adept at agentic and coding applications.
“Our model is designed for thinking,” Skyler Miao, head of engineering at MiniMax said. “In multi-turn agentic tasks, it needs to carry over the thinking content from each response into the next request to maintain a consistent reasoning chain.”
According to the article M2 is available through MiniMax’s application programming interface, or API, at a rate of $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, considerably lower than its U.S. rivals.
Again, the lower expense of development was one of the key attributes DeepSeek brought to the AI scene in January.
That led to a dramatic plunge in previously soaring AI-related stocks – see above. That has recovered since given the sheer scale of the evolving sector but U.S. firms continue to be wary of Chinese tech power and the increased political backing behind its start-up firms from President Xi as he targets first place in the global AI race.
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