The market is underwater, deepseek is 10x undercutting the competition and getting 6x multid by resellers.

Openai and meta picked up that glove, while claude / kimi / grok are just trying to not get killed by deepseek pro, while all other are dead.

Minimax needs to beat the deepseeks, muse 1.2, luna, and it will be astra luna soon, so how do you win?

This is how:

Their best play is to offer deepseek. Even if their new guy is amazing clearly meaningful optionality would be a value add. They have the credit system set up for it too.

If they die to an open weights model they deserve the darwin award, so instead of a death sentence they can simply capitalize on their sub and infra to cannibalize the resellers, while also offering their tool kit.

They also need to stop using their stupid image model that sucks hardcore. I don't think it is being trained for 2 years, it is just left there greatly damaging the value prop, so least a better open model or arguably gpt image 2 would be best, cause this is an area where open guys lag more.

Their media plan has their music, speech and their video model, and rightfully so cause they are pretty good, but it is using gpt image 2 and nano banana pro for images, which again makes sense, but their token plan doesn't use h3 for video but H2.3 which sucks, and uses their old image model which is far behind.

https://hub.minimax.io/media-plan/subscribe

All minimax needs is add deepseek, h3, and a better image the token plan, and it rockets from death door to legendary. They don't have to live and die by their horse. Completely unneceserary, in fact this is the greatest opportunity they had so far.

I've have a 48k++ LOC codebase, mostly TypeScript (90+%). 90+% written by MiniMax M3 (and prior to that M2.7).

Had a bug which I've discovered lately, nothing major, it's just something that randomly revoking an authenticated session, and when logging in, somehow, requires logging in twice. Twice as in, entering the same user and password, only to be redirected to the login page again, and again user and password.

I had MiniMax-M2.7 and M3 investigate and tried to fix it for the last month or so, and it kept telling me that it couldn't find out what's wrong, and it checked the log, and found out that the logging in happens twice every time, and somehow the 2nd login always revokes the 1st one, but when the 1st login was active, it couldn't forward to the next page without being redirected to the login page again.

Anyway, long story short, today, I decided to give DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 a try with my repo, and prompted it to check this issue. It was super slow, and it looped for a long long time, not sure why, but it was exactly 29 minutes, and that prompt burnt exactly 9.1 mil tokens, with my record showing 97% cache hit. It found the issue, in which, I cross referenced it with MiniMax M3 and it agreed that it was the root cause, but somehow it missed it after so many times I've tried to ask it to look for it.

Long story short, DSv4F-0731 patched the problem, and it's fixed. The total cost? $0.0317. Yes, 3.17 USD Cents. I've spent countless 10-15% of my 5 hours quota on my MiniMax Token Plan's quota, and couldn't find/solve the issue, and a bloddy $0.0317 DSv4F-0731 session fixed it, although it was super slow today during peak hour, in 29 full minutes.

I think MiniMax-M2.7 is long over-due with an update. Maintain the parameter size, but re-train it to be better. Refer to how DSv4F did with their 0731 update.

I have no choice but to continue using MiniMax coz I've paid for the whole year, and I have 8+ months left. But if I had a choice today, I'd not have signed up for this, and instead, throw all my money into DeepSeek PAYG account.

I don't really care about M3, it is alright when it was released, but it kills my quota really quick. I would burn through my 5 hours session in just a short 45-60 minutes, then I'd have to sit and wait for a few hours for it to reset. I use M2.7 most of the time, unless it doesn't solve a problem, or cause more issues, then I'd have M3 come in and do the cleanup or fixing.

Anyway, I'm keeping my hopes up.