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Xinmei Shen

Chinese AI firm MiniMax has launched H3, its newest multimodal video generation model, pledging to break closed-source “dominance” through open weights and competitive pricing – as rival ByteDance rolls out its latest Seedance 2.5 model.
H3 was currently the world’s most powerful AI model in video editing, according to benchmark platform Artificial Analysis. However, it trailed Google’s Gemini Omni Flash in text-to-video tasks, and ranked behind both ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Gemini Omni Flash in image-to-video capabilities.
Designed for commercial content creation across film, advertising, video games and product design, H3 is currently available via an application programming interface and MiniMax’s consumer-facing Hailuo AI platform.
Full model weights were slated for release “in the coming days”, MiniMax said on Friday.
While MiniMax’s previous Hailuo video models were proprietary, it decided to open up H3’s weights to “support the open-source community” and let users customise their own versions with “a broad range of AI hardware”, MiniMax said, citing hardware compatibility as a “key consideration” in H3’s design. Weights are the underlying parameters that encode an AI’s intelligence.
“Closed-source models have long dominated video generation, with slower iteration and a less open ecosystem than fields like large language models,” the company said in a blog post on Friday.
MiniMax would release H3’s weights under the MiniMax Community License, which permits free non-commercial use and commercial use for organisations with under US$20 million in annual revenue with attribution requirements, according to Artificial Analysis.
Such a licensing model was set to become more common for Chinese open-weight AI developers as they sought to commercialise their massive models, according to Goldman Sachs.
When available for download to the public, MiniMax H3 would become the world’s “strongest” open-weight video AI model, Artificial Analysis said.

MiniMax is leaning into aggressive pricing amid heated competition among Chinese video AI models.
H3 was priced at about half as much as peer offerings at 768p resolution (1,366 by 768 pixels) and only a third as much at so-called 2K resolution (usually 2,048 by 1,080 or 2,560 by 1,440 pixels), Jefferies analysts said in a note on Friday.
For instance, MiniMax H3 costs US$7.80 per minute at 2K resolution with audio, while ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 at 1080p (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) costs US$22.45 per minute, according to Artificial Analysis. The new MiniMax video model is, however, pricier than Google’s Gemini Omni Flash, which costs US$6 per minute, it said.
Chinese tech giant ByteDance also released its new proprietary video model Seedance 2.5 on Friday, boasting its ability to create 30-second videos in a single run with advancements in editing capabilities.
Seedance 2.5 would enable deeper AI use in industries such as education and industrial manufacturing, ByteDance said in a Friday blog post.
The Beijing-based company has sharpened its focus on using AI to serve corporate clients, having recently integrated the product team of office tool Lark into the product team in charge of its Doubao AI chatbot, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday.
ByteDance’s annual recurring revenue – a metric that projects 12-month income based on current monthly subscriptions – from large language models had reached US$4 billion this month, sources said.


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Firm aims to ‘support open-source community’ and a ‘broad range of hardware’, as H3 model bests Seedance 2.0 in some tasks


Firm aims to ‘support open-source community’ and a ‘broad range of hardware’, as H3 model bests Seedance 2.0 in some tasks.


Video AI: MiniMax challenges ByteDance with low price, open weights for new H3 model

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Firm aims to ‘support open-source community’ and a ‘broad range of hardware’, as H3 model bests Seedance 2.0 in some tasks

Firm aims to ‘support open-source community’ and a ‘broad range of hardware’, as H3 model bests Seedance 2.0 in some tasks