(Image Credit: Captured by Lin Zhijia, AGI Editor at TMTPost)

AsianFin -- Wei Wei, a partner and Vice President of MiniMax, one of China’s rapidly growing AI large model unicorns, has resigned from his position.

MiniMax has confirmed the news of Wei's resignation, noting that it is in line with the company's ongoing evolution. The company said that its business-to-business (B2B) operations are entering a new phase, which will now be overseen by other leaders within the team. Despite his exit, MiniMax emphasized that Wei's resignation will not impact the strength of its B2B services, particularly its AI offerings for enterprises.

Wei joined MiniMax in late 2023 to take on the role of Vice President and head of the MiniMax Open Platform. He played a key role in leading the company’s commercialization efforts in the AI-driven “business- to-business” sector. Before joining MiniMax, Wei had an extensive career in tech, serving as Vice President at Tencent Cloud and pioneering Baidu Intelligent Cloud's technology. Prior to that, he had started up a company.

Wei Wei

Wei previously expressed a strong belief in MiniMax’s potential, particularly in building the Open Platform team. He saw the challenge of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a long-term goal, and his work was focused on ensuring that the company remained at the cutting edge of AI algorithms while consistently delivering practical value for its users.

Founded in 2021, MiniMax has quickly emerged as one of China’s top AI large-model companies. Over the past few years, the company has raised over $1 billion in funding across four rounds, attracting high-profile investors including IDG Capital, Hillhouse Capital, China Life Insurance, Alibaba, Tencent, miHoYo, and Sequoia Capital China. The latest funding round, led by Alibaba Group in March 2024, boosted the company's valuation to $3 billion, cementing its place as one of China’s "Six Little Tigers of AI Large Models."˛

In January 2025, MiniMax released its next-generation 01 series models, which include the foundational language model MiniMax-Text-01 and the visual multimodal model MiniMax-VL-01. These models have been praised for their efficiency, with a remarkable capability to handle up to 4 million tokens, far exceeding the input capacity of other models like GPT-4 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet.

On the business side, MiniMax's products and services are divided into two primary areas: direct consumer-facing products and API-based B2B services. The company’s Open Platform has already attracted more than 30,000 enterprise clients, making it the most widely used AI large-model platform in China’s public cloud market. MiniMax processes over 3 billion AI interactions per day, handling an impressive 3 trillion tokens of data daily.

Despite its impressive growth, MiniMax is adjusting its strategy. Following the DeepSeek craze and evolving market trends, Yan Junjie, MiniMax’s CEO, acknowledged that the company needs to refine its approach. He highlighted two key lessons learned from DeepSeek: the importance of strong branding and a focus on product simplicity before full-scale commercialization.

As part of this strategy shift, MiniMax has now set its sights on breaking new ground in AI model technology, with a particular focus on consumer-facing services (To-C). In early February 2025, MiniMax announced the integration of DeepSeek-R1 into its overseas AI assistant platform, MiniMax Chat, offering it free for a limited time. This move signals a major pivot toward the consumer market, alongside continued advancements in its AI model offerings.

The company also recently saw other leadership changes. In September 2024, Zhang Qianchuan, who had been in charge of product leadership at MiniMax, stepped back from daily operations for personal reasons and transitioned to an advisory role. These changes, coupled with Wei’s resignation, indicate a broader restructuring within the company as it adjusts to shifting market conditions and a growing focus on refining its AI technology.