(April 10): Alibaba Group Holding Ltd revealed it created the “Happy Horse” video AI model that sent ripples across China’s AI industry this week, claiming ownership of a platform that topped global rankings on debut.
The platform marked the latest win for a Chinese company trying to remake itself into a leading player in artificial intelligence. Happy Horse 1.0 hit the top spot on the text-to-video leaderboard of Artificial Analysis this week, before its creator’s identity was disclosed on Friday. It is the product of the nascent Alibaba Token Hub’s innovation business unit, and still under a beta testing phase, a spokesperson for the company said.
The company plans to provide API access to the model “in the near future,” the Alibaba Token Hub spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the protocols that allow outside developers access its functions. “We aim to release more products soon.”
Happy Horse pushed ByteDance Ltd’s celebrated Seedance 2.0 into second spot and marked Alibaba’s best-scoring video product to date. Its earlier efforts topped out some 20 spots lower on the list, under the Wan brand. The exceptional performance on benchmarks and mysterious background led to excitement and guessing games among the AI and investor community in China, with many making the link to Alibaba and pushing its shares up as much as 8% on Wednesday. Happy Horse “is a success” for Alibaba, Jefferies analyst Thomas Chong wrote in a note this week.
Video generation is a capital-intensive and hotly contested race for artificial intelligence developers, as it’s proven to be one of the few sources of reliable monetization. With OpenAI’s retreat from the segment last month, the opportunity for Chinese companies has only grown larger, and most of the Artificial Analysis leaderboard is populated with products from Chinese companies. Generated video samples posted by the benchmark providers showed Happy Horse performing well against Seedance. Bloomberg couldn’t independently verify the sources of those videos.
Hangzhou-based Alibaba released the latest version of its flagship Wan video generator, developed by its Tongyi lab, earlier this month. The company hasn’t previously spoken publicly about supporting multiple teams working on parallel AI creative tools, though chief executive officer Eddie Wu has made AI development the overriding priority for all parts of the sprawling business.
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China’s largest e-commerce company has made a decisive pivot toward AI, headlined by Wu’s statement that it’s now pursuing artificial general intelligence as its primary goal. The company last month revamped its business structure with a focus on monetising AI. On Wednesday, it also announced a new four-member technology committee made up of top leaders — and chaired by Wu — and elevated the Tongyi research lab into its own business unit led by Zhou Jingren, formerly the chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud.
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