YANG Bin (杨斌)
(former) Co-founder, MiniMax — departed 2024
YANG Bin (杨斌) was a co-founder of MiniMax and served as the head of model training. He was a classmate of Yan Junjie at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS).
He earned his master's degree from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014, where he worked on deep learning projects. He then pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto (2016-2022) under Professor Raquel Urtasun, a senior research scientist at Uber ATG, where he helped build Uber's autonomous driving AI R&D center from scratch.
During his Ph.D., he co-founded Waabi, an autonomous trucking company, with his advisor. After returning to China, he co-founded MiniMax with Yan Junjie and led the technical team to develop MiniMax's foundational models across text-to-visual, text-to-audio, and text-to-text modalities.
He was the second founding core member to leave MiniMax after Song Yachen departed in late 2022.