By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, July 31 (Reuters) - Chinese AI firm MiniMax released a new video-generation model on Friday that can process text, images, video and audio, stepping up competition in a fast-growing market led by rivals ByteDance and Kuaishou.
The Shanghai-based company said its H3 model could generate videos of up to 15 seconds in 2K resolution with native stereo sound. It can also edit existing content and transfer movements from one video to another using instructions and reference material
supplied in different formats.
MiniMax said it planned to release H3's model weights within days, allowing users to download and customise the underlying system. The move would extend the open-weight approach increasingly adopted by Chinese AI developers into video generation, where many prominent models remain proprietary.
Founded in 2022, MiniMax is one of China's "AI tigers", a group of well-funded startups competing with domestic tech giants and U.S. leaders in the crowded market for foundation models. It became the second of the group to list publicly when it floated in Hong Kong in January, following Z.AI.
Reuters reported in early July, citing a person with direct knowledge, that MiniMax planned to launch H3 later in the month and that it was developing a 2.7-trillion-parameter language model.
Competition among Chinese video-model developers has intensified since ByteDance released Seedance 2.0 earlier this year, drawing widespread attention for its ability to produce sophisticated clips from combinations of text, images, audio and video. Its launch followed Kuaishou's release of Kling 3.0.
MiniMax said H3 was aimed at commercial applications including advertising, e-commerce, product design and games. It said generating 2K video would cost less than one-third of mainstream rival products.
Amid a growing push in China's AI sector to reduce its dependence on U.S. semiconductors, MiniMax said H3 was designed to work with several Chinese-made chips.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Stephen Coates)
