MiniMax opens the weights of its H3 video model under a revenue cap

MiniMax says H3's full weights ship within days, free below $20M revenue — a break from its previously closed Hailuo video models.

MiniMax has released H3, its newest multimodal video generation model, and says the full weights will follow within days — a break from the closed approach it took with earlier Hailuo video models. The company framed the decision as support for the open-source community and as a way to let users adapt the model across a broad range of AI hardware, which it says was a design consideration from the start. The release lands as ByteDance rolls out its Seedance 2.5 model.

The benchmark picture is mixed rather than dominant. The benchmark platform Artificial Analysis currently ranks H3 first in the world at video editing, but behind Google's Gemini Omni Flash on text-to-video, and behind both Gemini Omni Flash and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 on image-to-video. H3 is available now through an API and MiniMax's consumer Hailuo platform, aimed at commercial work across film, advertising, video games and product design.

The licence is where the abundance argument actually sits. The MiniMax Community License, as summarized by Artificial Analysis, permits free non-commercial use and commercial use by organizations under US$20 million in annual revenue, with attribution. That draws the line so a small studio or a single creator gets near-frontier video generation at no licence cost, while the incumbents keep the customers who can pay.

Watch whether the weights ship on the promised timeline, and whether the editing lead survives independent hands running the released model.

Source: SCMP Tech