China’s MiniMax releases cheap AI model ‘designed for real-world productivity’

South China Morning PostEN 1 min read 100% complete by Vincent ChowFebruary 13, 2026 at 03:11 AM

AI Summary

short article 1 min

Chinese AI company MiniMax has launched M2.5, an updated version of its M2 large language model, designed for practical applications. The release comes amid heightened investor interest in smaller Chinese AI firms. MiniMax claims M2.5 matches leading models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI in areas like coding and search, while maintaining cost efficiency with 230 billion parameters. The company emphasizes M2.5's affordability, stating it can be used continuously for an hour at a rate of 100 tokens a second for just US$1. This launch follows a similar release from rival Zhipu AI, highlighting the rapid advancements in China's AI industry.

Key Entities & Roles

Key Player Opposition Context

GLM-5 40% Zhipu AI 50% Anthropic 60% OpenAI 60% M2 ×270% China ×280% MiniMax ×690%

Keywords

artificial intelligence 100% minimax 90% large language model 80% m2.5 70% ai model 70% china 70% real-world productivity 60% cost efficiency 50% zhipu ai 40% tokens 40%

Sentiment Analysis

Positive

Score: 0.30

Source Transparency

Source

South China Morning Post

Classification Confidence

90%

Geographic Perspective

China

This article was automatically classified using rule-based analysis.

Topic Connections

Explore how the topics in this article connect to other news stories

No topic relationship data available yet. This graph will appear once topic relationships have been computed.

artificial intelligence minimax large language model m2.5 ai model china real-world productivity cost efficiency zhipu ai tokens

Explore Full Topic Graph

Find Similar Articles

AI-Powered

Discover articles with similar content using semantic similarity analysis.