Alibaba has confirmed it developed HappyHorse-1.0, an artificial intelligence video-generation model that climbed to the top of blind-test rankings on Artificial Analysis, a benchmarking platform, after it appeared earlier this month under an unknown identity.
The model led Artificial Analysis leaderboards for both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, prompting widespread online speculation about its origins before Alibaba acknowledged ownership.
Developers revealed on Friday via a newly created account on social media platform X that HappyHorse was part of Alibaba's ATH AI Innovation Unit and remained under development; Alibaba confirmed to CNBC that the post was genuine.
Hong Kong-listed Alibaba shares closed 2.12% higher on Friday and had risen as much as 6.75% earlier in the week, gains the company attributed partly to broader technology market moves and market speculation linking it to the model.
The disclosure adds to Alibaba's growing AI portfolio, which includes the Qwen large language model (LLM) and a consumer chatbot application, with chief executive Eddie Wu having made artificial intelligence the company's overriding strategic priority.
The timing is significant given recent turbulence among rivals in the AI video space.
OpenAI has discontinued its Sora video application and platform, while ByteDance has paused the rollout of Seedance 2.0 amid copyright disputes, leaving a gap in the market that Alibaba could seek to fill.
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The Chinese ecommerce and technology group has a range of potential applications for HappyHorse across its core businesses, including advertising, entertainment and its vast ecommerce platforms, where AI-generated video is increasingly used for product marketing.
The leaderboard performance, achieved before Alibaba publicly identified itself as the developer, underlines the pace of development in AI video generation and the growing competition between US and Chinese technology companies for dominance in the field.
The recap
- Alibaba confirmed it developed HappyHorse-1.0 video model anonymously.
- HappyHorse topped blind-test leaderboards on Artificial Analysis platform.
- The developers said the project remains under development.
