MiniMax Releases M2.5 Open Models Approaching State-of-the-Art at Fraction of Cost

Summary

Chinese AI startup MiniMax released two new open language models, M2.5 and M2.5 Lightning, which reportedly approach state-of-the-art performance while costing approximately 1/20th of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. The models represent another data point in the accelerating trend of capable open-weight models from Chinese AI labs offering competitive performance at dramatically lower price points. This development is part of a broader weekly AI news roundup from MarketingProfs dated February 13,