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, called HappyHorse-1.0, showed up 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 annoucement after reposting from its main account.
Alibaba shares rise after 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.
OpenAI 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.
HappyHorse-1.0 launched in an odd way
There was no big event, no technical explanation, and no company backing. It just appeared anonymously on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena rankings and climbed to the top.
HappyHorse, topped the rankings in text to video, image to video, and text to video with audio categories. It ranked second only in one category: image to video with audio, where Seedance 2.0 holds the lead.
Artificial Analysis uses blind tests where real people worldwide compare videos without knowing which model made them. Results get combined using an Elo rating system like chess rankings. This method is seen as more honest than when companies report their own scores, though new models’ scores can bounce around more because fewer people have tested them. A difference of about 60 points usually means one model wins consistently.
On X, people disagree about HappyHorse. Some doubt it, saying it falls short of Seedance 2.0 in showing character details and smooth movement. Others see promise, hoping it can fix the problem of keeping quality steady across multiple video shots.
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. The company says 2026 is important for speeding up AI work.
Video creation is one of the toughest areas where AI developers compete and one of the few that makes money. With OpenAI leaving last month, Chinese companies have more room to grow. Most top products on Artificial Analysis now come from Chinese firms.
Alibaba ATH says HappyHorse is part of exploring new ways to interact in the AI age and more products will come. Opening the programming interface will let outside developers use the model and test how well it works commercially.
China is also pushing hard towards AI chip independance. As reported by Cryptopolitan on Tuesday, Alibaba and China Telecom said they are building a computing center in southern China using chips 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.
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