MiniMax, a major #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 developer that was most recently valued at about $3 billion, plans to unveil a new open-source AI reasoning model as early as this week, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plan. The new model, MiniMax M1, is the company’s attempt to challenge another Chinese firm, DeepSeek, whose R1 open-source reasoning model took the world by storm earlier this year because of its high performance and low cost. MiniMax’s upcoming model, which hasn’t previously been reported, will further intensify competition in the global open-source AI market, where some Chinese firms’ models rank higher than those of Meta Platforms, according to numerous AI researchers and customers. Shanghai-based MiniMax, whose investors include Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, is one of the global leaders in video and audio AI models. But when it comes to large language models for text, MiniMax has lagged rivals. MiniMax’s AI roleplay chat app, Talkie, gained some traction last year as a rival of Character.AI in the U.S. https://techcrunch.com/20..