GuShiio.com 
(Photo source: Photo taken by Zhijia Lin, editor of GuShiio.comAGI)
On February 19, GuShiio.comAGI exclusively learned that Wei Wei, partner and company vice president of MiniMax, a China AI model unicorn, had recently resigned.
In response to the above news, MiniMax responded exclusively to GuShiio.comAGI: The news is true, MiniMax’s domestic B-end business has ushered in a new stage of development, and the team will be led by other leaders. MiniMax will continue to improve its technical capabilities and bring high-quality experiences to more customers at home and abroad.
People familiar with the matter emphasized to GuShiio.comAGI that Wei Wei’s departure does not mean that the MiniMax To B-end service will be weakened or cancelled.
Wei Wei
It is reported thatWei Wei joined MiniMax at the end of 2023 and serves as MiniMax partner, vice president, and head of MiniMax open platform. He is mainly responsible for commercialization business based on MiniMax To B. Before joining MiniMax, Wei Wei served as vice president of Tencent Cloud and wasBaiduA pioneer in intelligent cloud technology and also has some entrepreneurial experience.
Wei Wei previously stated that he joined MiniMax after being introduced, and one of his main tasks was to form the MiniMax open platform team. He believes that there is still a long way to go to achieve true AGI, and the team’s goal is to continue to maintain leadership in algorithms and always create practical value for users in business.
Founded in 2021, MiniMax has completed four rounds of financing totaling more than US$1 billion. Investors include IDG Capital, Hillhouse, China Life Insurance, Alibaba, Tencent, Mihayou, Sequoia Capital China, etc. The most recent one was In March 2024, it was led by Alibaba Group. The company’s latest valuation was US$3 billion (CB Insights data was US$1.2 billion), becoming one of the six domestic AI models(Dark Side of the Moon, Intelligent AI, Baichuan Intelligence, One Everything, MiniMax, Step Star).
At the product level,MiniMax has independently developed a multimodal universal large model, including trillion-parameter MoE text large model, video and music models, etc. Just on January 15 this year, MiniMax released and open-source a new generation of 01 series models, including the basic language model MiniMax-Text-01 and the visual multimodal model MiniMax-VL-01. This series of models can efficiently process inputs of up to 4 million tokens, and the input length is 32 times that of GPT-4o and 20 times that of Claude-3.5-Sonnet.
Regarding commercialization, I learned thatMiniMax’s commercialization is divided into product and API (ToB-end) businesses. The products are advertising and value-added services. There are two types of APIs: domestic and foreign. Wei Wei is responsible for the domestic API business.
As of now, the MiniMax open platform has served more than 30,000 corporate customers, making it the largest model open platform with the largest increase in public cloud usage in China.There are 3 billion AI interactions per day and 3 trillion Token data are processed.
However, under the DeepSeek craze at the beginning of this year, MiniMax chose to readjust its strategy.
Therefore, Yan Junjie believes that the model capability classification should be clearly defined first, the algorithms, data and reasoning processes needed to improve each generation of models should be clarified, and technical means should be used to approach the established indicators. At the same time, technology and products need to be distinguished. The core of technology lies in continuously raising the upper limit, which requires the ability to define the next generation model. ldquo; Don’t think that the model will get better after you have a product. The purpose of the product is not to make the model better, it is just a commercial product. What you really need to think about is how to better satisfy users.& rdquo;
On February 16 this year, MiniMax announced that its overseas version of AI assistant platform MiniMax Chat will be connected to the DeepSeek-R1 model for free for a limited period of time. At the same time, GuShiio.comAGI exclusively learned that MiniMax is shifting its business focus to AI large-scale model technological breakthroughs and To C business.
In fact, MiniMax has been adjusting dynamically. In September last year, MiniMax confirmed that Zhang Qianchuan, its product leader and former product leader for Today’s Headline Users, had since faded out of company affairs due to personal reasons and changed to the position of product consultant.
“Is it innovation at the algorithm, organization, and business levels, or is it a trade-off in direction? At least when we still have the opportunity, we should work hard to find a way.& rdquo; Yan Junjie emphasized that essentially no one can define AGI now. However, the level of intelligence will keep improving. It is a bit like the Long March. You don’t know where the final destination is, but you know that a better level of intelligence makes sense.
