Around April 7, 2026, a mystery model named HappyHorse-1.0 appeared on the Artificial Analysis video benchmarking platform, did not identify its creator, and proceeded to climb to the #1 spot on the text-to-video leaderboard. By the time it hit the top, it was leading second-place Dreamina Seedance 2.0 by nearly 115 Elo points — a gap roughly equivalent to the difference between a grandmaster and a solid club player in chess. People started guessing who was behind it. On April 10, Alibaba confirmed: HappyHorse was built by the company's Token Hub innovation unit in Hangzhou.
The second piece of news is actually more important than the leaderboard win. As of April 13, 2026, the top three text-to-video models in the world are all Chinese: HappyHorse (Alibaba), Dreamina Seedance (ByteDance), and Kling (Kuaishou). Sora, Veo, and Runway — the three US names people associate with AI video — are all trailing. This is the first time in the history of the category that no American model holds the #1 slot.
The 5-Second Version
- HappyHorse-1.0 is Alibaba's new text-to-video AI model, revealed April 10, 2026.
- It ranks #1 globally on text-to-video with 1389 Elo and #1 on image-to-video with 1416 Elo on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.
- It beat second-place Dreamina Seedance 2.0 by 115 Elo points — not a rounding-error win.
- Supports all four modes: text-to-video and image-to-video, each with and without native audio.
- Public API launches April 30. Pricing not yet announced.
- Top three video AI models in the world are now all Chinese. US labs trail.
The Leaderboard Story
Artificial Analysis runs blind-test leaderboards for text-to-video and image-to-video models. Users submit prompts, the platform shows them two randomly-selected outputs from different models, and users pick the better one. The results are Elo-rated like chess. It is the closest thing to a neutral global leaderboard that video AI has.
Around April 7, a model labeled only "HappyHorse-1.0" showed up. No one knew who built it. Over three days it steadily climbed until it passed every model in both categories. Here is roughly where the top of the leaderboard stands as of April 13:
Three Chinese models before the first American one. First time ever.
Who Actually Built This
Alibaba Token Hub is the innovation unit within Alibaba's DAMO Academy that has been quietly shipping video generation work for the last 18 months. They released an earlier model called Tongyi Wanxiang in mid-2025 that was respectable but not frontier. HappyHorse-1.0 is their next-generation effort, and based on the leaderboard results, it is a major step forward.
The model appears to be a diffusion-transformer hybrid trained on a mix of licensed video data and Alibaba's own e-commerce/entertainment corpus. It supports all four major video generation modes: text-to-video with and without native audio, and image-to-video with and without native audio. That is unusually comprehensive — most Western video models still handle audio as a separate post-processing step.
Bo's honest read: the gap is probably somewhat overstated by the Elo number. Benchmarks swing hard when a stealth model launches because early voters are enthusiasts who get excited. The gap will narrow as more people vote, but even if it compresses to half — HappyHorse is still clearly at or near the frontier, and Alibaba did not used to be on the video map at all.
What This Actually Means
China Is Winning at Open-ish Video AI
Three Chinese labs in the top three slots is not a fluke. ByteDance, Kuaishou, and now Alibaba have been systematically shipping video model improvements while Sora hit pause post-controversy and Runway focused on monetization. The Chinese labs have the training data advantage (TikTok, Douyin, Kuaishou, Taobao video) and the research talent, and they have been moving faster.
Creators Should Already Be Testing This
If you make video content for a living — marketing, ads, YouTube, TikTok — the best tool on the leaderboard is worth testing the week it launches. The API opens April 30. Don't wait for the "official" English-language tutorial economy to catch up. Sign up, run your actual workflows through it, see if it replaces or supplements your current stack.
Western Labs Are Not Out of the Race
Sora 2.0 was a big jump and Veo 3 is genuinely good. OpenAI has been conservative post-2024 around video for safety reasons, which has slowed their leaderboard climb but not their underlying capability. Expect a Sora 3 or Veo 4 release before end of 2026 that is very competitive with HappyHorse. Betting the US labs are permanently behind is premature.
Chinese API Access Is a Real Question
If HappyHorse's API is only available through Alibaba Cloud's China endpoint, US businesses will face data sovereignty and compliance headaches that make adoption hard. If Alibaba exposes it through Alibaba Cloud International, the friction drops substantially. Watch the April 30 launch details carefully — the deployment architecture will tell you how serious Alibaba is about Western adoption.
The Bottom Line
The broader story is that video AI is moving the way image AI moved between 2022 and 2024: three or four labs trading the #1 spot every few months, with the top of the leaderboard becoming indistinguishable from professional work. For the next six months, video is the most dynamic AI category in the world, and the winners are going to be the creators who test every new release the week it ships, not the ones waiting for the category to stabilize.
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