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Chinese companies continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other US-based AI companies.
this week, MiniMaxa startup backed by Alibaba and Tencent that has resurrected about $850 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $2.5 billion, debuted three new models: MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and T2A-01-HD. MiniMax-Text-01 is a text-only model, while MiniMax-VL-01 can understand both images and text. T2A-01-HD, meanwhile, generates audio — specifically speech.
MiniMax claims that MiniMax-Text-01, which is 456 billion parameters in size, performs better than models such as Google recently unveiled. Gemini 2.0 Flash on benchmarks such as MATH and SimpleQA, which measure a model’s ability to answer math problems and fact-based questions. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.
As for MiniMax-VL-01, MiniMax says it rivals Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet on assessments that require multimodal knowledge, such as ChartQA, which tasks models with answering questions related to the graph and diagram (eg, “What is the peak value of the orange line in this graph?” ). Of course, MiniMax-VL-01 is not better than Gemini 2.0 Flash in many of these tests. OpenAI GPT-4o and Meta Llama 3.1 beats on many, too.
Of note, MiniMax-Text-01 has an extremely large context window. The context of a model, or context window, refers to the input (for example, text) that a model considers before generating output (additional text). With a context window of 4 million tokens, MiniMax-Text-01 can analyze about 3 million words at once — or just over five copies of “War and Peace.”
For context (no pun intended), the context window of MiniMax-Text-01 is about 31 times the size of GPT-4o and Llama 3.1.
The latest of the MiniMax models released this week, T2A-01-HD, is an audio generator optimized for speech. T2A-01-HD can generate a synthetic voice with adjustable cadence, pitch and tenor in about 17 different languages, including English and Chinese, and clone a voice from just 10 seconds of an audio recording.
MiniMax has not published benchmark results comparing the T2A-01-HD to other audio generation models. But to this reporter’s ear, the T2A-01-HD’s outputs sound on par with audio models from Meta and startups like PlayAI.
With the exception of T2A-01-HD, which is exclusively available through the MiniMax API and the Hailuo AI platform, the new MiniMax models can be downloaded from GitHub and the Hugging Face AI development platform.
Just because the models are available “openly” doesn’t mean they aren’t closed in some respects, though. MiniMax-Text-01 and MiniMax-VL-01 they are not really open source in the sense that MiniMax did not release the components (for example, training data) necessary to recreate it from scratch. In addition, they are under MiniMax’s restrictive license, which prohibits developers from using the models to improve rival AI models, and requires platforms with more than 100 million monthly active users to request a special license from MiniMax.
MiniMax was founded in 2021 by former employees of SenseTime, one of the largest AI companies in China. The company’s projects include apps like Talkie, an AI-powered role-playing platform Character AIand text-to-video templates that MiniMax released on Hailuo.
Some of MiniMax’s products have become the subject of minor controversy.
Talkie, which was pulled from Apple’s App Store in December for unspecified “technical” reasons, features AI avatars of public figures like Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, and LeBron James, who no one seems to have agreed to be presented in the world. App.
In December, Broadcast magazine reported that MiniMax’s video generators can reproduce the logos of British television channels, suggesting that MiniMax’s models were trained on the content of those channels. And MiniMax is informed be accused by iQIYI, a Chinese video streaming service that says MiniMax illegally trained on iQIYI’s copyrighted recordings.
The new MiniMax models arrive days after the outgoing Biden administration proposed tougher export rules and restrictions on AI technologies for Chinese companies. Companies in China were already barred from buying advanced AI chips, but if the new rules go into effect as written, companies will face tighter caps on both semiconductor technology and the models needed for sophisticated bootstraps. AI systems.
Wednesday, the Biden administration announced additional measures focused on keeping sophisticated chips out of China. Chip foundries and packaging companies that want to export certain chips will be subject to broader licensing requirements unless they exercise greater scrutiny and due diligence to prevent their products from reaching Chinese customers.
