MiniMax's Fat Cat Universe

"Pang Mao Got Played by AI"

"AI products drop every day, foundation models update every month. Benchmarks and decks everywhere, invite codes and agents flying in tandem. Yet nobody cares except AI influencers.

And does anyone even remember, before the Hangzhou Six Little Dragons, the previous generation of gods were the AI Six Little Tigers 😭

In light of this, I hereby declare this week as the Funeral Love Savage Review Week. Going through each of the AI Six Little Tigers one by one, keeping it real.

One post per day, starting with MiniMax, tomorrow is Moonshot AI."

MiniMax updated its video model, and the Pang Mao bloggers' world collapsed.

The hilarious truth is, most of the Pang Mao videos you scroll through daily were made with Hailuo AI, MiniMax's flagship product.

Over the past two days, MiniMax updated its video generation model to Hailuo 2, and simultaneously overhauled Hailuo AI's membership system.

Previously, bloggers could register new accounts to generate massive quantities of Pang Mao videos for free. Now they need to pay for memberships starting at 68 RMB/month, up to 10,788 RMB/year, to batch-produce Pang Mao content.

Betrayed, countless Pang Mao bloggers angrily chanted the slogan — "The cat that floats the conch can also sink it!"

Overnight, Pang Mao bloggers across the internet posted farewell videos, smashing Hailuo AI in rage. Some defected to Doubao, attempting to continue exposing Hailuo's "capitalist true face."

The most hilarious part? MiniMax itself came out and admitted fault. On Hailuo AI's official Douyin account, they posted a video that opened by quoting the Pang Mao bloggers' revolutionary slogan ⬇️

Hailuo AI Douyin Account

After expressing how Hailuo AI and Pang Mao are deeply in love, Hailuo AI gifted unlimited memberships to select top Pang Mao bloggers.

It really did that, I'm not crying you're crying 😭

Alright, memeing aside, let's seriously look at how MiniMax got entangled with Pang Mao.

The answer, most likely, lies in MiniMax's other AI product: STARFIELD.

On the STARFIELD app, Pang Mao is one of the most popular AI characters. 152,000 users have chatted with Pang Mao.

The most popular is "Pang Mao for Video Creation," with which users have generated 1.547 million conversations.

I strongly suspect that younger users — primarily middle and elementary school students — are propping up STARFIELD's DAU. Because the IPs that blow up on STARFIELD tend to be absurdist meme figures that younger students love to play with.

The remaining washed-up absurdist internet celebrities: "General Yu" has 1.247 million conversations; "Sun Xiaochuan" only has a pitiful 44,000.

Don't ask why Pang Mao and Kobe memes go viral. Absurdism needs no why.

It's like how a group of elementary schoolers can laugh for an entire semester at a classmate's name containing the character for "shit." Pang Mao, Kobe, Sun Xiaochuan — these figures inherently carry weight and taboo. Their names themselves constitute an incantation, a self-contained viral structure.

Invoking their names is like how elementary schoolers provocatively call their parents or teachers by their full names — no specific action needed, the mere act of speaking the name delivers the transgressive thrill of breaking a taboo.

And MiniMax, a high-tech AI foundation model company, the most unhinged of the AI Six Little Tigers, combining tradition and modernity, harnessing both magic and technology, has satisfied younger students' hidden psychological desires through its own AI products.

From this perspective, MiniMax is unquestionably the smartest AI company.

STARFIELD is unquestionably China's hottest non-model-layer AI application, with absolutely real data — the Pang Mao frenzy on short-video platforms is the proof.

What is growth hacking?

MiniMax uses data to tell you: Pang Mao IS the growth hacker!

From STARFIELD to Hailuo AI, MiniMax accidentally built an absurdist data flywheel: younger users chat with the Pang Mao AI character, generate Pang Mao videos with Hailuo AI, then rack up hundreds of millions in organic traffic on short-video platforms — isn't this the exact data flywheel that Yang Zhiheng wanted to build for Moonshot AI 😭

Pang Mao bloggers' traffic is absolutely insane — a single Douyin video can hit millions of likes

Dreamina, Keling AI, Veo 3 — all of you, step aside.

The mutual rise of MiniMax and Pang Mao perfectly illustrates why greatness cannot be planned.

Are Kobe and Pang Mao the kind of growth levers that 985 graduates could design? If you had Sam Altman respawn in China, could he have come up with using Pang Mao to generate AI videos?

This is innovation — absolute innovation that nobody else could have conceived.

Like Pop Mart, MiniMax's aesthetic sensibility is also core to its competitive advantage.

Pang Mao generated by Doubao completely lacks the passive-aggressive flavor that Hailuo AI produces. It's like other designer toys that can't replicate Labubu's subtly punchable expression.

Compare this to the other AI companies.

After DeepSeek R1's launch, all the AI Six Little Tigers looked half-dead:

Nobody's discussing Yang Zhiheng and Moonshot AI anymore; Zhipu AI and StepFun have become boring government-contracting companies; even fewer people know how Chuan Wang is doing AI healthcare; startup guru Kai-Fu Lee is still stubbornly insisting his company hasn't fallen apart.

Only MiniMax remains active on the front lines of unhinged content creation, aka product-building.

I still remember this April, right after MCP blew up, MiniMax launched an MCP server that let you call it from Cursor to clone voices, generate images, and create videos.

If only Pang Mao fans weren't so young and technically illiterate — someone would've definitely built a Pang Mao video workflow, using MiniMax's full product suite to achieve round-the-clock automated Pang Mao memorial content.

I suggest that MiniMax should develop a Pang Mao Agent, completing the Pang Mao video workflow loop as soon as possible, so Pang Mao bloggers can achieve McDonald's freedom.

Of course, MiniMax isn't fully satisfied with its unhinged positioning. It still wants to be a foundation model company.

These past two days, MiniMax released its new video generation model Hailuo 02 (which incidentally triggered this "cat sinks the conch" saga); open-sourced its reasoning model MiniMax-M1, whose main selling point is ultra-long context — up to 1 million tokens, matching Gemini 2.5 Pro; and released a general-purpose Agent that can generate web pages and make PowerPoints.

But honestly, these models and Agents are all pretty boring.

Hailuo AI is strong, but I genuinely can't tell how it's different from competitors like Dreamina and Keling AI. Its visual realism still seems slightly inferior to Veo 3.

The reasoning model and Agent are even less impressive. Besides AI influencers posting benchmarks, I don't know who's actually using them. Long-form writing? Gemini 2.5 Pro. Coding? Claude 4. Best open-source? Qwen 3 or DeepSeek R1. Better Agents for making PowerPoints? Manus and Genspark exist.

Fortunately, MiniMax holds the trump card of Pang Mao.

Compared to the other Six Little Tigers, MiniMax has definitely won. Because I genuinely can't think of a single advantage the others have.

MiniMax wins because it's not a pure foundation model company. Its unhinged creativity is genuinely impressive — fast reactions, wild methods, meme-literate.

Now when I hear Pang Mao, I think of MiniMax. When I hear MiniMax, I think of Pang Mao.

Truly, the cat that floats the conch 😭😭😭

(Images in this article from Hailuo AI, research compiled by ChatGPT o3 — a rare instance of purely human writing)