MiniMax CEO Yan Junjie said inference costs for leading AI models could fall by another order of magnitude within one to two years, following a similar drop over the past year. Speaking at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Yan cited advances in system optimization and algorithms as key drivers.
His remarks come amid an intensifying price war in China’s large model market, where custom projects that sold for over RMB 10 million ($1.4 million) in 2023 are now being offered for as little as RMB 200,000 ($28,000). Yan believes AI capabilities will continue to grow while becoming more cost-efficient. He emphasized that AI systems are now being trained through reinforcement learning in environments with defined rewards, accelerating generalization and expert-level performance.
Yan also said the rise of open-source models and multi-agent systems is reshaping the landscape, making it unlikely for any single company to dominate the market. MiniMax is one of China’s six leading LLM startups. [The Paper, in Chinese]
Related
