MiniMax: More bounce than Tigger
As we thunder into the uncharted waters of a brave new year, there may be some who believe the mother of all corrections is about to rip portfolios to shreds, but such nerves do not appear to be creasing the brows of the stout burghers of Hong Kong.
The latest AI IPO to show more bounce than Tigger was that of MiniMax, whose share price shot up 87% on its first day of trading in Hong Kong as investors bet on the possibility of Chinese minnows catching up with US whales.
The MiniMax app that is gaining the most traction in the US is Talkie, which allows pasty-faced enthusiasts in darkened basements the world over to have AI-driven chats with “connections” who don’t exist. Once you have clarified your pronouns, your gender preferences and your age group, the top level of which is a catch-all “over 26″, you can pretend to chat with Donald Trump, Father Christmas, your kid’s smoking-hot French teacher or pretty much anyone else who tickles your fancy.
It’s probably safe to say that you shouldn’t be expecting Shakespearean levels of dialogue and MiniMax is unlikely to do a lot to make the world a better place, but 11-million monthly active users seem to be enjoying it. MiniMax’s Hailuo AI allows you to generate video and audio from text, so even the technically challenged can crank things up a notch or two by creating a video of said smoking-hot French teacher cartwheeling down the Rue du Montparnasse in the rain while singing La Vie en Rose.
Soho House: A club gets clobbered
There’s a lot to be said for the traditional model of a members’ club being owned by its members, since any other ownership model is bound to kick up intractable conflicts of interest, as appears to be the case at Soho House.
The ideal for the members tends to be a convivial space where some interesting people can get together for some decent browsing and sluicing far from the prying eyes of the Twitterati and, in many cases, away from ominous surveillance by spouses.
This is all well and good, but it is never going to fund the ambitions that Soho House had in terms of building the global empire that now consists of 46 clubs around the world and somewhere north of 270,000 members.
From its early days when it took great pride in admitting only people who worked in the creative industries, there are now dread rumours that the club has been opening its hallowed portals to, whisper it softly, people who work in finance.
Clearly investors may not be too unhappy about tables of investment bankers ordering Dom Perignon by the bucket, as opposed to artists eking out the occasional half a shandy, but since the company listed on the NYSE in 2021 its share price has tracked steadily downwards amid complaints about overcrowding and lack of exclusivity.
It proposed a deal to return to private ownership but this plan stumbled when MCR Hotels, one of its lead backers, admitted that it was unable to fund its $200m commitment, and now it looks like it’s back to the drawing board.
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