MiniMax, a Chinese AI startup, has launched its new M2.5 language model in two variants, promising high-end artificial intelligence at a fraction of the cost of competitors like Claude Opus. The model, released on February 12, 2026, is available open source on Hugging Face under a modified MIT License, and is being served through its API and those of its partners, according to VentureBeat.
The M2.5 models are designed to make advanced AI more accessible due to their significantly lower cost. According to VentureBeat, the price is estimated to be only 1/20th of the cost of Claude Opus. The open-source license requires that users of the model for commercial purposes "prominently display 'MiniMax M2.5' on the user interface of such product or service."
In other tech news, Forgent Power Solutions, a company formed from four legacy companies, recently went public with a successful initial public offering in February, growing to a market cap of nearly $8 billion. According to Fortune, the company's CEO, Gary Niederpruem, stated that the IPO is "bringing sexy back" to the electrical distribution space, which is experiencing a boom due to the AI race and the expansion of data centers. Forgent serves data centers, power grids, and industrial markets, with the data center segment growing the fastest.
Also, the latest changes to the main branch of Zig were announced on February 13, 2026, including the implementation of iouring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io. These are based on userspace stack switching and are now available for experimentation, according to the Devlog.
In the job market, Cogram, an AI platform for architects, builders, and engineers, is seeking a Product Engineer. The role is remote, with a salary range of 70K - 130K EUR, according to Hacker News.
Additionally, a project called yt-media-storage is available on GitHub, which stores files onto YouTube by encoding them into lossless video and decoding them back to the original file. It supports both a command-line interface and a graphical user interface, according to Hacker News.
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