PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Yan Junjie

Also known as Jun-Jie Yan, Jun-jie Yan, JunJie Yan, Junjie Yan, 闫俊杰, 閆俊傑

Yan Junjie founded MiniMax, an AI company whose work spans foundation models and consumer products. He studied mathematics at Southeast University, completed a doctorate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 focused on deep learning, and worked on speech recognition at Baidu. After more than six years at SenseTime, he became a vice president and deputy head of its research institute. Hailuo AI added video generation to its consumer platform, and he is among the authors of the long-context MiniMax-01 report. At WAIC 2025, he delivered the keynote “Everyone’s AI”; as of March 2026, he was MiniMax Group’s chairman and CEO.

Now at
MiniMax Group
Works
304
Citations
30,146
h-index
84

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. By 2015

    Speech and deep learning

    At a Baidu internship in 2014, he worked on large-scale speech recognition and encountered GPU clusters. He studied mathematics at Southeast University and completed a doctorate at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, with doctoral work focused on deep learning.

  2. 2015–2021

    Research leadership at SenseTime

    After joining SenseTime as an intern in 2015, he spent more than six years there and rose to vice president. He also served as deputy head of its research institute and CTO of its smart-city business group.

  3. 2021–2024

    Building MiniMax

    He founded MiniMax in Shanghai at the end of 2021, before ChatGPT’s rise. The company developed foundation models and consumer products.

  4. September 2024

    Bringing Hailuo into video

    Hailuo AI, MiniMax’s multimodal consumer platform, added a video-generation feature after starting with text and music generation.

  5. January 2025

    Extending the context window

    He is among the authors of MiniMax-01, a foundation-model report that describes a one-million-token context during training and up to four million tokens during inference.

  6. July 2025

    An AI keynote for everyone

    At WAIC 2025, he delivered a keynote titled “Everyone’s AI.”

  7. As of March 2026

    Leading MiniMax

    He is MiniMax Group’s chairman and CEO. The company sells audio- and video-generating models to enterprises and individual developers.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Yan Junjie yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Inside MiniMax: Testing if AGI is Possible Without Infinite VC Money turingpost.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Yan Junjie - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Yan Junjie forbes.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. MiniMax CEO Keynote at WAIC 2025: Everyone’s AI minimax.io. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Yunqi Capital | In Conversation with MiniMax’s Junjie Yan: AGI Isn’t a Weapon — It’s a Product Ordinary People Use Every Day elsewhere.news. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.