Critic Faults MiniMax M3 Launch for Lacking Frontier AGI Lab Vision

I need to be ruthlessness-maxing I have been very soft on MiniMax, largely because many of their people follow me and seem to be good faith researchers. They're getting punished by the market anyway, so here goes. (inhales) What I saw, from the outside:

bad strategic vision, or rather absence of it. Smallness. I can tell what DS and Kimi, even StepFun are trying to achieve and it goes beyond a coding plan business, there's a scientific research program or even philosophical and aesthetic project behind them all. GLM is a slow-but-steady commercial program with good execution, long-term ambition and academic foundation. I have no clue what you were going for, it felt like merely chasing the latest monetizable trend or just a claim to revenue. Too much cope about perils of high-risk architecture research after M1 with "Lightning Attention" didn't do well; too cowardly and long-lasting a retreat into a long-derisked GQA design, empty triumphalism that you optimized and it's "very fast" (uh-huh, until KV cache memory pressure becomes the bottleneck, which it does in agentic workloads), even some sneering about NSA's scaling failure (of course DeepSeek just went back to the drawing board and invented DSA and then 2 other designs). Spins that M2 was "mini actually, we just were surprised how good it works so skipped a full-size one" and "still Opus-tier fr fr, check out SWA-bench" despite obvious overfit which became more obvious as harder and more OOD evaluations started coming out. Reliance on raw distillation – 100x more than DS as per Anthropic's report, and unlike them, not using Claude creatively to reverse engineer its reasoning or reward profile, but a raw 2024-coded attempt at capability theft. Presumably, underdeveloped culture of telemetry and internal evals, which is why you constantly make claims that real user experience doesn't match, like early-fusion multimodality that falls apart completely unlike Gemini's, or even Kimi's late fusion. I also suspect bad scaling laws. Flexing 996 in 2026? Over-the-top and yet amateurish self-promotion on social media that looks desperate. Your CEO had said he took inspiration from Wenfeng on openness, but it might have been a PR move rather than Yang Zhilin's "we drop our armor, and dare the world find a flaw" after all. Despite this, you have strong sides. I hoped this distillation will be metabolized into robust capabilities via your RL flywheel you are clearly proud of. You know AA benchmarks where you do unusually well, like Omniscience non-hallucination, or agentic ones that your RL does cover. M3 isn't a crappy model for its scale, and might have a nontrivial potential as a base. You dared to ship a simple and apparently efficient attention. You have raised capital that should have sufficed for a more significant acceleration. But overall… …NGMI energy. You need to change pace by M3.1. Reform yourselves like Kimi did all the way back then in January 2025, or get what you deserve. They will be getting what they deserve, too.

MiniMax's market cap has fallen about HK$240 billion (US$31 billion) since its March 2026 peak, a roughly 65% decline. That's more value than most Chinese AI companies have ever been worth.

The easy conclusion is that something is fundamentally wrong with the company. The numbers don't support that.

Revenue grew 159% in 2025 to US$79 million. The company has US$1.1 billion in cash. Adjusted net losses were roughly flat year-on-year at about US$250 million. Operationally, the business is improving.

What changed was the valuation.

At its March peak, MiniMax traded at more than 600x trailing revenue. For comparison, OpenAI and Anthropic were valued at roughly 35x and 27x revenue at similar stages. Investors weren't valuing the business as it existed. They were valuing what it might become.

The challenge is that the current business mix doesn't yet support that kind of multiple. During the first three quarters of 2025, Hailuo and Talkie generated 67.7% of revenue but carried gross margins of just 4.7%. The B2B platform business, which generates around 69% gross margins, contributed only about a third of revenue. Today, the low-margin consumer business is carrying most of the revenue, while the higher-margin enterprise business that could eventually justify the valuation remains relatively small.

Three events then forced investors to focus on the fundamentals: the July 9 lockup expiration affecting about 63% of the Hong Kong float, the May 29 filing for a secondary STAR Market listing, and the pricing controversy around M3 that raised questions about monetization.

None of this means MiniMax is failing. It means investors stopped valuing the story and started valuing the business. A company trading at 600x revenue while nearly 68% of revenue comes from a sub-5% gross margin business was always going to face scrutiny.

The key question now is whether the higher-margin B2B business can scale fast enough to close that gap before the lockup expiration and secondary listing add more pressure.