DeepSeek raised roughly $15B (about 100 billion yuan), with Tencent, CATL, Geely, GigaDevice, Meituan and more than 15 other investors participating. Its valuation climbed from $50B in June to nearly $89B in four months. The signal: two days after the US ordered federal agencies to strip DeepSeek's technology from their systems, Chinese capital answered with one of the largest AI funding rounds ever.
MiniMax started as a consumer chat app company, then M2.5 scored 80.2% on SWE-bench Verified at 1/10-1/20 the cost of Claude Opus; M3 (456B total / 45.9B active) became the first open-weight model to clear 59% on SWE-bench Pro, with 1M context powered by their novel Sparse Attention mechanism.
The institutional map of top AI conferences is being rapidly redrawn. Industry labs dominate frontier model development—nearly 90% of notable models came from industry in 2024—but academia remains the largest source of highly cited research. Chinese universities went from challengers to nearly half of NeurIPS paper volume in five years, while OpenAI and Anthropic have nearly vanished from conference author lists. The decoupling of publication volume from research capability is the defining signal.