Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (TMTPost · Nov 8, 2026)

Yan Junjie: MiniMax to Stay Open Source Until AGI, Annualized Revenue Tops $800M

KEY FACTS

Yan Junjie says China's best models reach about 95% of top US performance at one-tenth the cost.
MiniMax has only 500 people and insists on building its own infrastructure and simplifying architecture to boost efficiency.
As of August, annualized revenue run rate exceeded $800 million, with enterprise business contributing over 80%.
First-half 2026 revenue was $116.6 million, with an adjusted net loss of $293 million.
The H3 model drew about 25 million downloads in the month after release, spawning about 300 derivative models in two weeks.

KEY DATA

Over $800 millionAnnualized revenue run rate (August)

$116.6 millionFirst-half 2026 revenue

283.1%First-half revenue year-over-year growth

$293 millionAdjusted net loss

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

MiniMax treats efficiency as its weapon: compute constraints forced it to build its own infrastructure and low-cost inference, then spend the saved compute on post-training. Open source buys community ecosystem, enterprise private deployment buys revenue; whether this path works hinges on how fast losses narrow. For users, low-cost multimodal models and deployable weights are tangible benefits.

Source: TMTPost report