Hong Kong stocks linked to Chinese AI firms surged on Thursday after MiniMax unveiled Music 2.5, a music-generation model that the market treated as a tangible step toward industrial-grade audio production. MINIMAX-WP (00100.HK) jumped as much as 20% intraday and was trading up about 16% at the time of the report; nearby AI names including Weimob (02013.HK) and Zhipu (02513.HK) also rose, reflecting investor appetite for applications-ready AI rather than speculative large‑model metrics.
The MiniMax announcement emphasised two technical advances: ‘‘paragraph-level precise control’’ of music structure and ‘‘physical-level high-fidelity reproduction’’ of vocal and instrumental timbres. Creators can now label sections such as Intro, Bridge and Hook, preset emotional arcs and designate instrumental arrangements, while the model’s vocal synthesis claims finer pitch transitions, natural vibrato and better chest/head resonance switching — improvements that address longstanding quality and mix-separation issues in AI-generated music.
MiniMax says Music 2.5 is built for professional workflows and already integrates into film scoring, dynamic game audio and branded sound design pipelines, promising studio-grade deliverables for business customers. The announcement dovetails with a string of domestic advances — Zhipu’s open-source GLM-4.7‑Flash for lightweight enterprise deployment and MiniMax’s Agent 2.0 workstation — which together show Chinese vendors focusing on engineering robustness, deployment flexibility and end-to-end automation for commercial clients.
The market reaction has a strategic undertone. Broker research from GF Securities argues that true monetisation will come first from vertical, industry-specific models that match domain workflows and delivery standards, not from headline parameter counts. That alters investor math: valuation will increasingly depend on technical-to-business conversion rates in sectors such as film, gaming and advertising where repeatable B2B contracts are feasible.
Outside China, the debate over practical agent-capable models has been fuelled by projects like ClawdBot, led by developer Peter Steinberger, which attracted attention for being largely AI‑generated and for a stable local Mac Studio deployment. The developer’s reference to MiniMax 2.1 as the most ‘‘agentic’’ domestic model underlines how engineering-level work — packaging models into reliable, locally runnable systems — is becoming as important as raw model architecture.
The short-term payoff is visible in stock moves and rising interest in ‘‘AI + enterprise services’’ plays. Longer term, the industry faces headwinds: intellectual property and copyright disputes over training data and outputs, questions about creative attribution and labour impacts in music and media, and the judgement of professional buyers on whether AI-produced audio truly meets studio standards. Nonetheless, MiniMax’s release marks a practical milestone in China’s AI landscape: the competition is moving from scale to a three‑dimensional contest of technology, scenario-specific fit and commercial execution.