It’s becoming a familiar pattern: Every few months, an AI lab in China that most people in the U.S. have never heard of releases an AI model that upends conventional wisdom about the cost of training and running cutting-edge AI.
In January, it was DeepSeek’s R1 that took the world by storm. Then in March, it was a startup called Butterfly Effect—technically based in Singapore but with most of its team in China—and its “agentic AI” model, Manus, that briefly captured the spotlight. This week, it’s a Shanghai-based upstart called MiniMax, best known previously for releasing AI-generated video games, that is the talk of the AI industry thanks to the M1 model it debuted on June 16.
According to data published by MiniMax, its M1 is competitive with top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek when it comes to both intelligence and creativity, but is dirt cheap to train and run.
The company says it spent just $534,700 renting the data center computing resources needed to train M1. This is nearly 200-fold cheaper than estimates of the training cost of ChatGPT-4o, which, industry experts say, likely exceeded $100 million (OpenAI has not released its training cost figures).
