Alibaba's AI video model rises to No. 2 in global rankings, as OpenAI's Sora and ByteDance's Seedance fall away

Alibaba Cloud on Sunday released HappyHorse 1.1, a major upgrade to its AI video generation model that the company says delivers production-ready video synthesis across core content creation scenarios. The model is now live on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio with full API access for enterprise customers and developers, accompanied by a 40% sitewide launch discount for the first two weeks. Alibaba Cloud described the release as systematically optimized across core content generation scenarios. The most consequential upgrade is multi-image reference capability, which Alibaba calls R2V (Reference-to-Video). The feature allows users to upload multiple character reference images and maintain consistent identity across generated video. Motion quality receives a significant overhaul, with what Alibaba describes as strengthened motion modeling that addresses prior limitations in speed and fluidity. The company also made targeted improvements to visual texture, specifically calling out the elimination of facial oiliness, over-sharpening, and unnatural textures. HappyHorse 1.1 improves audio-visual synchronization, including what Alibaba claims is zero-drift lip sync for dialogue scenes and context-aware speech pacing. The model also improves instruction-following for long and complex prompts. OpenAI discontinued Sora after it proved financially unsustainable. ByteDance indefinitely shelved the international rollout of Seedance 2.0 following a barrage of copyright complaints from Hollywood studios. According to Arena.ai, HappyHorse 1.0 now holds the No. 2 position across all three Video Arena leaderboards. The platform noted the model scores 1,444 in both text-to-video and image-to-video categories, leading Google's Veo-3.1 (with audio) by 69 points in text-to-video and xAI's Grok-Imagine-Video by 23 points in image-to-video.