Happy Horse: Alibaba's secret AI video model storms the benchmarks

In the race for the best Artificial Intelligence video model, a new name is making waves: Happy Horse has jumped to the top of various benchmarks right from the start. It has also surpassed Seedance 2.0, the model from TikTok publisher ByteDance. A media report now claims to know who is actually behind it: the Chinese internet giant Alibaba.

On the Happy Horse website, where interested parties can try out the model, there is no information about who is behind the open-source AI model. With Happy Horse 1.0, videos with 1080p resolution and synchronized audio can be generated. It is considered one of the first open-weight models that natively generates dialogue, ambient sounds, and effects in a video. A current comparison shows how other AI video generators with and without sound perform. Happy Horse avoids the multi-stage process common in other models, where first the silent video, then the audio, and finally the lip-sync is generated. In addition to English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean, German and French are also supported as languages.

Mystery Model as a PR Gag

The US tech magazine The Information now claims to have identified the Alibaba Group as the creator, citing unnamed sources. The cloud computing division of the internet company is currently preparing the release for enterprise customers, the report further states.

The release as Happy Horse follows a pattern of announcement that has become common in AI circles. Models are initially released as “Mystery Models” with unknown origins. Just recently, manufacturer Xiaomi also used this approach when its AI model MiMo-V2 caused a stir under the pseudonym Hunter Alpha. In the best case, they generate great attention due to their performance, as is the case with Happy Horse. At a certain point, it is then revealed who is really behind it. Chinese AI models in particular apparently hope for a greater PR effect this way than if they presented the models themselves initially.

China's AI Models Push Ahead

After OpenAI recently announced that it was completely unexpectedly stopping its video AI Sora, Chinese providers are pushing their models further and further. The AI video generator Seedance 2.0 from ByteDance, released in February, was already considered outstanding because it generates hyper-realistic videos, which, however, quickly drew the attention of Hollywood studios due to alleged copyright infringements.

ByteDance has now imposed limits on its Seedance 2.0 model to block protected characters. What has been seen of Happy Horse so far is similar, if not even more remarkable. Compared to the results of the first Sora version from February 2024, which attracted a lot of attention at the time, the outputs are often indistinguishable from AI videos for the layman. This is a problem that users of social media increasingly experience in everyday life.

(mki)