K-Culture GlossaryㅁThe companies in the headlines
MiniMax
A Chinese multimodal AI developer — the Hailuo video brand and the character chat app are both products of this same company.
In plain words
MiniMax is a Chinese AI company founded in Shanghai in 2021. It trains its own models for text, images, video, and voice.
The multiple names cause confusion. Its video service is called Hailuo, and its character chat app is called Talkie — but both belong to the same company. Articles often mistakenly treat these as separate companies.
The name itself is misleading too. It has nothing to do with the minimax algorithm from game theory, and no connection to Microsoft either. The company sometimes releases model weights openly, but it is itself a for-profit, publicly listed business.
As of August 2026, the company's two main focuses are coding and video. Its coding agent, MiniMax Code, was upgraded to version 2.0 with added browser automation capabilities, and its video model H3 gained recognition for its performance, even being adopted into a product by the US company Luma — a reversal of the usual direction, with a Chinese model becoming a component in an American product.
How it shows up in the news
"A video made with Hailuo" — Hailuo isn't a company name; it's the name of the video service made by MiniMax.
See also
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