MiniMax has maintained a relatively low profile in China's AI scene, but its Hailuo AI video generation capabilities have earned considerable acclaim among industry insiders.
Product Form
Hailuo AI is MiniMax's consumer-facing product, encompassing text conversation, speech synthesis, and video generation. Video generation is its standout feature.
Users can generate short videos from text descriptions, with styles covering realistic, animated, artistic, and more. The output quality places it in the top tier among domestic tools, and in some scenarios, it can compete with early versions of Sora.
Technical Foundation
Behind the video generation is MiniMax's self-developed multimodal foundation model. Similar to Sora, it follows a Diffusion + Temporal Modeling approach.
MiniMax's key differentiators include:
- More accurate understanding of Chinese contexts (Chinese prompts don't need to be translated into English before generation)
- Strong character consistency (a character's appearance remains stable throughout a video)
- Relatively fast generation speed compared to similar products
Video Generation Landscape
There is currently no clear winner in this field:
- Sora (OpenAI): Most well-known, but its commercialization path has been rocky
- Kling (Kuaishou): Likely the most used in China
- Runway: Popular among overseas creators
- Hailuo AI: Catching up quickly in quality and user experience
Unlike text generation, users have a much lower tolerance for "good enough" in video. A finger with an extra joint or an object suddenly disappearing can ruin an entire video. This places extremely high demands on the model's understanding of the physical world and temporal consistency.
MiniMax's strategy is multimodal advancement—using a unified underlying architecture for text, speech, and video, allowing understanding across different modalities to reinforce each other. In the long run, this approach may offer more advantages than building a video-only model.
Sources: MiniMax official product page, CocoLoop, 36Kr report