A powerful artificial intelligence video creator that appeared without warning on international testing platforms has turned out to be the work of Chinese technology company Alibaba, giving the firm a major boost in the competitive AI race. The tool, HappyHorse-1.0, was sighted on the Artificial Analysis benchmarking website around April 7 without any company name attached.
It quickly rose to first place in rankings for creating videos from text descriptions and turning still images into moving clips. On Friday, the people behind HappyHorse set up a new account on X and said the project came from Alibaba’s ATH AI Innovation Unit. They added that work on the system continues. Alibaba confirmed the announcement after reposting from its main account.
Alibaba shares rise over AI video model ownership reveal
Alibaba’s shares in Hong Kong went up 2.12 percent on Friday after the news came out. Earlier in the week, on Wednesday, the stock had jumped 6.75 percent when technology shares broadly gained ground after tensions between the United States and Iran cooled down. Some market watchers had already been wondering if Alibaba was connected to the unnamed model.
The company has been working hard to grow its AI products as Chinese firms compete fiercely in this space. It already has the Qwen large language model and a chatbot application. While Alibaba released other AI systems before that could make videos, none created as much excitement or scored as well as HappyHorse did in just a few days. This new tool could make Alibaba stronger in video creation, especially since other companies have hit problems.
OpenAI recently shut down its Sora video app, saying it wanted to concentrate on coding tools, business customers, and general artificial intelligence work because computing costs were too high. The firm stepping back might help Chinese competitors, but ByteDance had to stop rolling out its popular Seedance 2.0 after Hollywood studios and streaming services accused it of copyright violations.
Alibaba’s chief executive, Eddie Wu, has made AI development the top goal for the company’s many different businesses, which also cover computer chip design and data centers. The company has already built its AI models into online shopping, advertising, and entertainment products, and might plan to do the same with HappyHorse. Alibaba’s earlier Wan video creator ranked only around 20th on Artificial Analysis, so HappyHorse reaching the top shows a big jump in Alibaba’s video AI abilities.
China is also pushing hard towards AI chip independence. As reported by Cryptopolitan on Tuesday, Alibaba and China Telecom said they are building a computing center in southern China using chips that Alibaba designed. The facility will have 10,000 Zhenwu semiconductors made for AI work that can run systems with hundreds of billions of parameters. China Telecom will own and run the location.
