Photographer: Lam Yik/Bloomberg Chinese startup MiniMax Group Ltd. spent its first three years largely on the sidelines of the generative-AI boom. As rivals chased local ChatGPT clones, the Shanghai-based team tackled a harder problem: building a single model capable of processing text, speech and video. Founder Yan Junjie sums up the period in one word: “Painful.” Most Read from Bloomberg “It took four years to reach this point — the first three were defined by pure agony,” Yan said in an interview w ...