Chinese start-up MiniMax launches record-breaking AI model

MiniMax M2 achieved an unprecedented score for an open model on Artificial Analysis’s overall intelligence index, placing it among the top five models globally. It surpassed Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, released in June, and sat below leading models from US companies OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.

With 200 billion parameters, MiniMax M2 adopts the Mixture-of-Experts architecture, which has significantly enhanced the efficiency of Chinese AI models over the past year.

The model activates only 10 billion of those parameters for each “forward pass” – the process of input data handling – continuing a trend among Chinese developers to improve efficiency.

Using only a small subset of parameters allowed the model to operate efficiently at scale, according to Artificial Analysis. For comparison, DeepSeek’s V3.2 model and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 use 37 billion and 32 billion active parameters, respectively.

“I am really impressed by their progress,” said Florian Brand, a PhD student at Germany’s Trier University and an expert on open models, highlighting substantial improvements from the previous M1 model.