MiniMax M2.7: The $0.30 AI Model That Built Itself
The AI cost curve didn’t just bend — it snapped. Chinese AI lab MiniMax just released M2.7, a model that scores within spitting distance of Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 on coding benchmarks, runs on modest hardware, and costs $0.30 per million input tokens. That’s roughly 17x cheaper than Opus on input and 21x cheaper on output. But the price isn’t even the headline. The headline is how they built it: M2.7 helped build itself. ...