On October 28th, it was reported that Zhong Yiran, Senior Research Director of MiniMax, has resigned, and her specific whereabouts have not been disclosed yet. According to public information, Dr. Zhong Yiran graduated from the Australian National University and studied under Professor Li Hongdong and Academician Richard Hartley. And has published more than 40 research papers in international authoritative journals and top academic conferences, covering fields such as TPAMI, IJCV, IEEE TIP, CVPR, NeurIPS, ECCV, ICCV, ICLR, EMNLP, etc., and holds multiple US patents.
At the end of 2023, Zhong Yiran proposed a concept for efficient architecture of large models in MiniMax and worked with the R&D team to promote the application of linear attention mechanism in large-scale language models. In 2024, the team officially launched the MiniMax-01 project, with Zhong Yiran as the project leader, fully leading the architecture design and research and development of the model. In early 2025, MiniMax officially released the MiniMax-01 model based on the Lightning Attention architecture. This model has attracted widespread attention in the industry since its launch and is widely regarded as a groundbreaking language model.
As one of the key figures in achieving this result, Zhong Yiran played a crucial role in the project. He led the team to complete the entire process from theoretical innovation to engineering implementation, promoting Lightning Attention to become the focus of industry attention and laying the foundation for MiniMax's technological system. MiniMax responded to this by saying, 'Zhong Yiran resigned six months ago and was only involved in the research and development of M1. We wish him better development in the future.'. ”
