MiniMax head of engineering Skyler Miao departs, spanning M3, Code, Agent lines
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-19
Skyler Miao (阿岛, 缪宇航), Head of Engineering at MiniMax leading Agent engineering, has left the company per his Feishu status; his next move is unknown. His remit spanned MiniMax M3.x, MiniMax Code, Audio and Hailuo AI — covering nearly all of the company's key lines: language models, coding products, agents, voice and consumer multimodal apps.
Miao joined MiniMax in July 2023 after roles at Baidu (ads anti-fraud backend), Beike (R&D director) and ByteDance (Xigua Video tech lead). A listed author on the M2 technical report, he frequently explained the company's technical direction publicly, arguing that "the real competition in the agent era has shifted from the model to the harness," and that today's application-layer Skill/Workflow/Harness moats may eventually be re-absorbed by foundation models.
The departure comes as MiniMax doubles down on coding and agents: Agent Team upgrade in May, the M3 flagship and MiniMax Code in June, and the H3 general video model in July. No successor or destination has been announced.
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