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MiniMax

Models & Products
Aliases： MiniMax Hailuo 海螺 ·2026-09-19

MiniMax

MiniMax (Shanghai Xiyu Technology / 稀宇科技) is a leading Chinese multimodal foundation-model startup founded in 2021, focused on large language models, video generation, and speech synthesis. The company runs two brands — domestic 海螺 AI (Hailuo AI) and international MiniMax (MiniMax / Hailuo) — and ships models under names like MiniMax-Text-01, abab, Hailuo S2V/T2V, and T2A-01, exposed via the API platform api.minimaxi.com.

Key products

Large language models

  • abab series (2023-2024): early proprietary LLMs focused on long context
  • MiniMax-Text-01 (2024): open-weights LLM with a 4M-token context window, comparable to GPT-4 / Claude 3.5
  • MiniMax-Text-01 / M1 and successors strengthen reasoning and agent capability

Video generation

  • Hailuo S2V-01 (subject-to-video): reference-subject consistency for image-to-video
  • Hailuo T2V-01 (text-to-video): text-to-video
  • Hailuo I2V-01 (image-to-video): animate a still image
  • Widely recognized as top-tier video quality, on par with Sora / Runway Gen-3 / Kling

Speech synthesis

  • Speech-02 / T2A-01 (text-to-audio): commercial-grade TTS, multilingual, emotional, voice cloning — one of China's TTS benchmarks

Consumer products

  • 海螺 AI (Hailuo AI): domestic web / app chatbot, video and voice tools
  • MiniMax / Hailuo AI: international versions of the same product line
  • Talkie / 星野 (Xingye): AI character-companion products (high ARPU business in 2024)

Influence

  • One of the "five little dragons" of Chinese LLMs (alongside ByteDance Doubao, Alibaba Tongyi, DeepSeek, Kimi)
  • Among the first to ship a commercial Sora alternative in video generation, winning through engineering rather than papers
  • MiniMax-Text-01's 4M-token context window was the longest among open-source LLMs at release
  • Full-stack multimodal coverage (text + video + voice) is rare in China — MiniMax is one of the few to commercialize all three
  • Aggressive commercialization: Hailuo / Xingye / Talkie rank in the highest-DAU tier of Chinese AI products

Limitations

  • Limited corporate transparency; funding and valuation rely mostly on media leaks
  • B-side enterprise deals are less publicly documented than ByteDance / Alibaba's
  • Video generation compute cost is high; main monetization is consumer subscriptions
  • International brand MiniMax is concentrated in Silicon Valley and SEA, still behind overseas LLM leaders