Chinese AI company MiniMax releases new models it claims are ...Chinese firms continue to release AI models that rival the capabilities of systems developed by OpenAI and other U.S.-based AI companies. This week, MiniMax, an Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup that has raised around $850 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $2.5 billion, debuted three new models: MiniMax-Text-01, MiniMax-VL-01, and T2A-01-HD. New AI Models OverviewMiniMax-Text-01 is a text-only model with 456 billion parameters, outperforming models like Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash on benchmarks like MMLU and SimpleQA. On the other hand, MiniMax-VL-01 can understand both images and text but falls slightly short of Gemini 2.0 Flash on tasks like ChartQA. MiniMax's T2A-01-HD is an audio generator that can produce synthetic voices with various attributes in multiple languages.Performance ComparisonMiniMax claims that MiniMax-Text-01 surpasses Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on different evaluation metrics. The company highlights the large context window of MiniMax-Text-01, allowing it to analyze extensive amounts of data in one go compared to other models in the market.Availability and Legal AspectsWhile MiniMax’s new models can be downloaded from GitHub and Hugging Face, they are not entirely open source as the necessary components to reproduce them are not public. Developers using MiniMax-Text-01 and MiniMax-VL-01 are subject to licensing restrictions, especially on improving rival AI models and serving platforms with significant user bases.Challenges and ControversiesMiniMax, founded by former SenseTime employees, has faced challenges with its products like Talkie and video generators. These challenges include issues with unauthorized use of public figures' avatars and potential copyright infringement claims from companies like iQiyi.Regulatory ImpactThe release of MiniMax’s new models comes amidst proposed stricter export rules on AI technologies for Chinese ventures by the Biden administration. These regulations aim to restrict the flow of advanced chips and models to China, posing challenges for companies in the AI sector.