MiniMax's Founder, The Man They Called a Fraud

In early 2022, Yan Junjie was pitching Chinese investors on artificial general intelligence. Some in big-tech circles had a shorter answer: fraud. He later summarized the period in one word: "painful." Four years later, on January 9, 2026, MiniMax listed in Hong Kong at HK$165 a share. The retail tranche was oversubscribed 1,837 times. The stock closed day one up more than 70%, market value briefly past HK$90 billion — about $11.5 billion. Bloomberg counted the founder's stake at $3.5 billion. A ¥280,000 anchor The number that explains him is not $3.5 billion. It is ¥280,000 — the annual salary he told friends he was aiming at as a PhD student: a Java developer job at IBM. Born in 1989 in Xiayi County, Henan, he taught himself advanced calculus in high school, took a math degree at Southeast University, then a PhD at the Institute of Automation, CAS, under Stan Z. Li. He joined SenseTime as an intern in 2015, left a vice president six years later, having built its deep-learning toolchain and private supercomputing center. His direction changed in 2019, watching OpenAI's bots beat the world's best Dota 2 players. Inside MiniMax he goes by "IO" — input/output, and Dota's wisp hero. The gaming thread is causal, not cosmetic: he met miHoYo's founders through gaming, and they became early backers. Bets that were arithmetic In December 2021, eleven months before ChatGPT, he quit SenseTime and founded MiniMax with Yun Yeyi and Zhou Yucong, named after the minimax algorithm. Investors heard "metaverse." Hillhouse offered a blank-valuation term sheet; he wrote in $30 million at a $200 million valuation, and declined more. The second bet came in mid-2023, mid-funding-round at a ~$1 billion valuation: roughly 80% of compute onto mixture-of-experts, while dense models were still consensus — unit economics at tens of billions of tokens per day. The result, abab 6.5, claims performance within 5% of leading US models at around 1% of their cost. The consumer layer paid the compute bill. Talkie became the fourth most-downloaded AI app in the US in H1 2024, ahead of Character.ai. Hailuo AI added video in September 2024. The lows came through the same channel: Glow pulled from app stores in March 2023, Talkie from the US App Store in December 2024 — a warning phrased as a compliment. The deficit he admits to The IPO ledger: 212 million users across 200+ countries, 130,000 enterprise customers, revenue of $53.44 million in nine months of 2025 — up 174.7% year over year, more than 70% from overseas — and a $512 million net loss. Yan narrates his position as a deficit. In June 2026 he put the gap to US frontier labs at roughly ten times in model size, "a full two-generation gap," and said a 10-trillion-parameter model would need about 200 trillion tokens of data — more high-quality data than the world has. His answer: the "10X" program, hiring economists, psychologists, and physicists into the training pipeline. Asked in 2024 what AGI arriving would look like, he said: "The day people stop thinking of AI as AI, that's probably when it arrives." By his own definition, the work is not done. By his own numbers, it is not close. The man once called a fraud keeps raising the bar.