MiniMax's Co-founder Yang Bin Departs, Leaving after Song Yachen
TapTechNews July 6th news, it is reported by AI Technology Review under LeiFeng.com today that Yang Bin, the co-founder of MiniMax, has left the company and his next destination has not been disclosed for the time being.
MiniMax received a $600 million investment led by Alibaba at the beginning of this year, and its valuation also exceeded $2.5 billion (TapTechNews note: currently about 18.205 billion RMB), once becoming the company with the highest valuation in the large model field.
Yang Bin and Yan Junjie in the core founding team of MiniMax are alumni at the University of Science and Technology of China. The data shows that Yang Bin pursued a master's degree in the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014 and participated in related projects of deep learning.
In 2016, Yang Bin enrolled in the University of Toronto to pursue a doctoral degree for six years, under the tutelage of Raquel Urtasun, a senior research scientist of the Uber ATG research team, and was involved in the work of the Uber ATG research institute, building the AI research and development center for Uber's self-driving from scratch. And in the last year of his doctoral study, Yang Bin and his supervisor jointly founded the self-driving company Waabi, mainly using the end-to-end technology stack based on data-driven to solve the problem of unmanned truck transportation. In just 3 years, the company has reached the Level 4 autonomous driving level.
After graduating with a doctorate, Yang Bin and Yan Junjie decided to return to China for entrepreneurship. During MiniMax, Yang Bin led the technical team to develop the underlying model of MiniMax, forming the basic model architecture of text-to-visual (text-to-visual), text-to-audio (text-to-audio), text-to-text (text-to-text) three major modes, and it is an earlier team to explore the capabilities of three modal large models simultaneously in China.
It is learned that in the core founding team of MiniMax, in addition to Yan Junjie, Yang Bin, Zhou Yucong, and Dr. Ye (Yun Yewei), Song Yachen from SenseTime is also one of the early co-founders, but Song Yachen left MiniMax at the end of 2022 and independently started a new AIGC3D company VAST. This means that Yang Bin is the second initial core member of MiniMax to leave the company after Song Yachen.