1. this is apparently MiniMax's "launch week" - they did M1 on Monday and Hailuo 2 on Tuesday (https://news.smol.ai/issues/25-06-16-chinese-models). remains to be seen if they can keep up the pace of model releases for the rest of this week - these 2 were big ones, they aren't yet known for much else beyond llm and video models. just watch https://x.com/MiniMax__AI for announcements.

2. minimax m1's tech report is worthwhile: https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M1/blob/main/MiniMax_M... while they may not be the SOTA open weights model, they do make some very big/notable claims on lightning attention and their GRPO variant (CISPO).

(im unaffiliated, just sharing what ive learned so far since no comments have been made here yet

A few thoughts:

* A Singapore based company, according to LinkedIn. There doesn't seem to be much of a barrier to entry to building a very good LLM.

* Open weight models + the development of Strix Halo / Ryzen AI Max makes me optimistic that running great LLMs locally will be relatively cheap in a few years.

"We publicly release MiniMax-M1 at this https url" in the arxiv paper, and it isn't a link to an empty repo!

I like these people already.

This is stated nowhere on the official pages, but it's a Chinese company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniMax_(company)