What's this about?
Yesterday's MiniMax-H3 release turns out to be Hailuo's video-generation model with open weights — community estimate: "about 80% of Seedance 2.0", which would make it state-of-the-art among *open* video models.
What exactly is Hailuo / Seedance?
Hailuo (海螺) is MiniMax's video-generation product; Seedance is ByteDance's video model, widely treated as the closed-source quality bar. "80% of Seedance for free with weights you can run" is the pitch.
What's the community saying?
61 likes on the framing tweet; 3.6k on the release itself.
- Open video generation has lagged open LLMs badly — this narrows the gap in one release.
- Timing reads as deliberate: dropped within hours of Qwen 3.8 Max, in the middle of the open-weights debate.
- Practical follow-ups: VRAM requirements and license terms — can indie creators actually run it?