The opening morning of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2025 (WAIC) in Shanghai was buzzing with hardware demos and multimodal avatars, yet the moment that set the tone for the three-day summit was a keynote titled “Everyone’s AI.” Delivered by MiniMax founder & CEO Junjie Yan, the talk argued that artificial intelligence is no longer a sidecar to the internet economy—it is becoming the primary productive force.
From research toy to societal engine
Yan traced a 15-year personal journey in AI research, noting that tasks once handled by junior engineers—code writing, data annotation, even literature review—are now 70 % automated inside MiniMax. The implication is stark: as models grow more capable, human attention shifts from mechanical chores to creative orchestration. “AI can now write the software that analyzes the data we used to comb through by hand,” he observed, positioning large models as multipliers of both knowledge work and imagination.
The economics: another 10× drop on the horizon
MiniMax isn’t just waxing philosophical; it is betting on cost curves. Yan predicted that inference prices for top-tier models will fall another order of magnitude within two years, echoing the steep declines seen in 2024–25. Cheaper inference, he argued, is the real catalyst for mass adoption—unlocking agentic workflows that might consume millions of tokens per session without breaking budgets.
Many models, many values
Contrary to fears of an AI monoculture, Yan expects plurality to define the market. Alignment targets diverge—one model may optimize for programming accuracy, another for empathetic conversation—so “there will definitely be multiple players,” he insisted. Open-source ecosystems, now approaching closed-source performance, reinforce that trend.
Multi-agent systems change the rules
Inside MiniMax’s own products—Conch AI for voice, M-Series for reasoning, and the new MiniMax-M1 hybrid model—multi-agent architectures are displacing single-model pipelines. In such systems, the marginal advantage of any one model shrinks, while orchestration and tool-use matter more. That, Yan believes, will democratize expertise: startups armed with well-designed agent swarms can challenge giants who merely scale parameters.
A less money-burning industry
Dropping costs and smarter experiment design mean AI R&D need not be an endless bonfire of GPUs. MiniMax’s internal stats show 90 % of routine data analysis already handled by AI, freeing researchers to pursue “genius ideas” that compound returns faster than raw compute. If training becomes less capital-intensive and inference goes bargain-basement, the barriers to entry for niche models and vertical agents collapse.
“Everyone’s AI” as call to action
Yan closed by reframing access as both economic necessity and moral imperative: AGI, when achieved, should belong to multiple companies and a broad user base—not a solitary gatekeeper. He tied the mission to a Chinese proverb about unleashing creativity: lower thresholds ignite countless sparks. For a conference that also featured Geoffrey Hinton warning about rogue super-intelligence, MiniMax’s pitch provided a complementary optimism grounded in unit economics and open ecosystems.
Why it matters
The keynote crystallizes a broader shift in 2025: value is migrating from parameter counts to deployment fluency, from cloud monopolies to community forks, and from eye-watering API bills to near-frictionless inference. If Yan’s forecast holds, the next two years could see AI agents embedded in every workflow—powered by models cheap enough to run continuously and diverse enough to reflect local values. In that future, “Everyone’s AI” is not a slogan; it is table stakes.
