Alibaba’s open-source Sora-like AI video model tops third-party rankings

Wan 2.1, which boasts performance that rivals other leading offerings, is among a series of new models developed by Alibaba

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Alibaba’s offices in Beijing. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:00pm, 3 Mar 2025

Alibaba Group Holding’s newly released artificial intelligence (AI) video-generating model, Wan, has received an enthusiastic reception from developers worldwide, as it becomes the most popular model on Hugging Face, the largest open-source AI models community.

The cloud computing unit of Alibaba last week unveiled Wan 2.1, the latest iteration of its Sora-like video model, boasting performance that rivals other leading offerings. As of Monday, it ranked as the top video-generation model on the VBench Leaderboard, a benchmark test for video generation, and was the only open-source model among the top five.

Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, is doubling down on its AI strategy, investing significantly in models and computing power.

The Chinese tech giant has budgeted at least 380 billion yuan (US$52.4 billion) for computing resources and AI infrastructure over the next three years, marking the largest-ever allocation by a private Chinese entity.

Its shares rose 3.5 per cent in Hong Kong on Monday morning.

Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced four variants of the new model series, making them freely available for academics, researchers and commercial institutions worldwide to use and modify.