🧠 Five days, five launches: MiniMax just shifted the AI landscape 🧠
Week of June 23rd, 2025
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Special AI News Roundup: MiniMax
Written by AJ Green
It was just past midnight in Shanghai when the MiniMax team agreed to meet with me-only a handful of hours before they would rewrite AI history. They were giddy, and not because their 512-GPU cluster had finally cooled. They held a secret the rest of the world was about to learn, one powerful enough to tilt the entire AI industry.
At dawn their time the world would meet M1: 4.56 T parameters, hybrid-attention, a one-million-token canvas, trained for $534k-less than your typical Bay-Area pre-seed. On benchmarks it lands 76.9 % on AIME 2025 and 92 % on HumanEval, coming within a few % from OpenAI’s o3… not to mention the API ships at $0.82, 10x cheaper than o3. To top it off, MiniMax open-sourced the weights under Apache 2.0 and called it Day 1 of #MiniMaxWeek.
Most companies would dine out on a single feat like that for a quarter; MiniMax treated it as Monday breakfast. Day 2: Hailuo 02 drops: native-1080p video at $0.25 for a six-second 768p burst. It debuts with a 1332 ELO, #2 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard-90 points above Google’s Veo 3. The buzz hit a fever pitch with the Kitty Olympics Hailuo UGC video racking up over 10 million views across X, TikTok, and Instagram in 1 single day. The team also teased an official circus trailer - showing off that Haiuo 02 is currently the only model that performs extreme physics tasks-gymnastics, diving, skiing, and aerobatics-with both fidelity and flair.
Day 3: MiniMax Agent lands, entering the ring against OpenAI’s Operator and Manus. Operator is polished but dependent-limited to browsing and bookings with constant user oversight. Manus handles deep workflows, but remains closed-door, enterprise-gated, and inaccessible to most builders. MiniMax threads the needle: fully autonomous, multimodal-capable, and open-sourced for global deployment-pushing the boundaries of what agents can actually do.
The launch stirred up buzz on X, being dubbed as "Manus AI + Deep Research + Computer Use + Lovable in one." Early demos ranged from a Netflix clone with playable trailers to multi-agent reasoning chains-tasks that typically demand far more compute and orchestration.
Day 4: Video Agent goes live and introduces a new category entirely: vibe-videoing. This is full-spectrum vibe marketing handled by an agent. Script, soundtrack, scene pacing, and emotional tone get composed in one cohesive shot. For the first time, an AI doesn’t just make a video - it captures a mood and manufactures momentum.
Day 5: MiniMax Audio breaks the sound barrier. It lands #1 across both Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face’s TTS benchmarks, beating every known voice stack in blind A/B tests. Speech-02 turns a 3-second audio clip into a fully cloned, emotionally responsive voice-across 32+ languages - with zero transcripts, no prep, and full stylistic control.
Remember the shockwaves from DeepSeek R1’s open-weight debut or Manus’s viral agent preview? VC term-sheets flew within hours. MiniMax just landed a deeper strike across every modality, and our community is catching the swell before it crests mainstream. To put it into perspective, any one of these drops is front page news - but to drop ALL of it within one week…this is a tactical strike on the AI industry. If you wanted proof the innovation center of gravity is sliding eastward and cheaper-this is it.
Money fuels the tempo: $850 million raised in 24 months-$250 M in 2023 and Alibaba’s $600 M Series B last March-now priming a Hong Kong IPO as early as Q4 2025 . Inside edge: the team’s lining up a 10× GPU expansion, and-if the IPO window stays open-they’ll drive token prices to zero for startups willing to build on top. Hit Follow and drop your build plan in comments.
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🇵🇭 AI Collective Manila: The New Marketing Playbook
Taguig’s creative hub filled quickly as more than a hundred marketers and founders gathered for The Collective’s first Manila meet-up on AI in marketing. Opening remarks rolled straight into a fireside chat where Anthony Guanzon and Carlo Almendral outlined why every modern CMO needs an AI plan that covers team structure, tool selection, and brand safety.
Momentum built with a panel featuring Wanda Pascua, AJ Dimarucot, Michael Juat, and moderator Kat Gonzalez. Speakers shared clear tactics for training teams, testing generative content, and using predictive targeting to lift campaign ROI. The conversation carried into open networking where new partners sketched pilots on coffee-stained notebooks. Guests left with actionable ideas, fresh contacts, and a sense that Manila is ready to push regional marketing into its AI-native era.
Premier Partner Spotlight: Roam
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Thanks for another great week. Tune in same time next week for more!
~ Noah & AJ
About Noah Frank
Noah is a founder, innovation strategist, policy researcher, and community builder at the edge of AI. After consulting at BCG, he now guides governments, Fortune 500 teams, and early-stage startups on turning foresight into practical action. His work blends governance, product strategy, and revenue design to keep transformative tech aligned with human progress.
About AJ Green
AJ Green is a founder, writer, scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer—scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity. Borderline obsessed with building the infrastructure for the next generation of AI-native companies and the intelligence that power them.