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

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company MiniMax has released a new model “designed for real-world productivity”, hot on the heels of new releases from its domestic rivals in a frenetic week for China’s AI industry.The update to its M2 large language model comes as investor interest in smaller Chinese AI companies hits new heights, with global investors looking to capitalise on China’s rapid progress in AI beyond the traditional tech giants.Citing in-house benchmark scores, MiniMax said on Friday morning that M2.5 was its most powerful model yet, with performance matching leading models from the likes of American heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI in key areas such as coding and search.One of the model’s strengths was its fast and cheap speed due to the cost efficiency achieved at a model size of 230 billion parameters, unchanged from previous M2 model iterations, MiniMax said.“M2.5 is the first frontier model where users do not need to worry about cost, delivering on the promise of intelligence too cheap to meter,” the company said, adding that the model could be used continuously for an hour at a rate of 100 tokens a second for just US$1. Tokens are small chunks of data read or generated by a model.MiniMax rival Zhipu AI rolled out a new flagship model, GLM-5, on Wednesday that doubled the size of its previous iteration to reach 744 billion parameters.