China’s MiniMax And DeepSeek Have A Compute Capacity Of Sub-100,000 H100-Equvalent GPUs, And Yet Their Latest Models Continue To Scale The Frontier Curve, With Distillation Failing To Explain This Disparity
The heretofore uncontested placement of the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 model at the pareto on the agentic benchmark score vs. cost curve (which simply means that the model achieves an optimal balance between the two) was fairly short-lived, with the new MiniMax M3.1 Flash having just taken a lead. Even so, with Anthropic and OpenAI both clamping down on distillation attempts, it is uncertain if China's AI labs would be able to maintain their current trajectory, especially given their relatively minuscule compute footprint. The MiniMax M3.1 Flash model debuts with 428 billion total parameters…
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