Does it bother anyone else that the author drops "MiniMax" there in the article without bothering to explain or footnote what that is? (I could look it up, but I think article authors should call out these things).

There are tons of terms that aren't explained that some people (like me) might not understand. I think it's fine that some articles have a particular audience in mind and write specifically for those, in this case, it seems it's for "Apple mobile developers who make LLM inference engines" so not so unexpected there are terms I (and others) don't understand.

I think articles are worse when they have to explain everything someone off the street might not know.

Yes, maybe. But it would be nice if there would be footnotes or tooltips. Putting the explanation in the text itself breaks the flow of the text so that would make it worse indeed.

No because it was obvious from context clues that it was an LLM model. Not every word needs to be defined. Also if you were unsure and decided to search “MiniMax M2.1”, every result would be about the LLM.

MiniMax is a company. It isn’t a term of art or something. It would be like defining Anthropic.

minimax is an algorithm for choosing the next move in an n-player game, discovered by John von Neumann in 1928