Four years ago, as Yan Junjie pitched his vision for artificial intelligence startup MiniMax Group Inc. to China’s largest internet companies and tech investors, the response was unanimous — and brutal.
“They genuinely believed we were frauds,” Yan recalls of the response to his idea: a company built entirely around multi-modal AI, meaning it’s capable of processing text, images, audio and video together.
Today, Shanghai-based MiniMax is a multibillion-dollar firm, making him a billionaire at 36. Its models — which he obsessively benchmarks against OpenAI — are helping fuel a new wave of technological nationalism. Along with peers such as ...