This comes amid the Chinese company’s push to remake itself into a leading player in artificial intelligence.
Alibaba Group revealed it created the “Happy Horse” video artificial intelligence model that sent ripples across China’s AI industry this week.
The platform, which topped global rankings on debut, marked the latest win for a Chinese company trying to remake itself into a leading player in AI.
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 (Apr 10).
It is the product of the nascent Alibaba Token Hub’s innovation business unit and is still under a beta-testing phase, a spokesperson for the company said.
The company plans to provide application programming interface access to the model “in the near future”, the spokesperson added, referring to the protocols that allow outside developers to access its functions.
“We aim to release more products soon.”
Happy Horse pushed ByteDance’s celebrated Seedance 2.0 into the 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 platform’s exceptional performance on benchmarks and mysterious background led to excitement and guessing games among the AI and investor communities in China, with many making the link to Alibaba and pushing its shares up as much as 8 per cent on Wednesday.
Happy Horse “is a success” for Alibaba, Jefferies analyst Thomas Chong wrote in a note.
Video generation is a capital-intensive and hotly contested race for AI developers, as it has proven to be one of the few sources of reliable monetisation.
With OpenAI’s retreat from the segment in March, the opportunity for Chinese companies has only grown larger; 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 could not independently verify the sources of those videos.
In April, Hangzhou-based Alibaba released the latest version of its flagship video generator Wan, developed by its Tongyi lab.
The company has not spoken publicly about supporting multiple teams working on parallel AI creative tools, though chief executive officer Eddie Wu has made AI development the priority for all parts of the sprawling business.
China’s largest e-commerce company has made a decisive pivot towards AI, headlined by Wu’s statement that it is now pursuing artificial general intelligence as its primary goal.
In March, the company revamped its business structure with a focus on monetising AI.
On Wednesday, it announced a new four-member technology committee made up of its top leaders, chaired by Wu. The group also elevated the Tongyi research lab into its own business unit led by Zhou Jingren, formerly the chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud.