This comes as the Chinese company is reinventing itself as a leading player in artificial intelligence.
issued Friday, April 10, 2026, 4:41 p.m.
[WASHINGTON, DC] Alibaba Group revealed this week that it has created “Happy Horse,” a video artificial intelligence model that has caused ripples in China’s AI industry.
The platform, which shot to the top of the global rankings upon its debut, is the latest victory for the Chinese company, which is reinventing itself as a leading player in the AI field.
Happy Horse 1.0 took the top spot on Artificial Analysis’ text-to-video leaderboard this week before the identity of its creator was revealed on Friday (April 10).
It is a product of the fledgling Alibaba Token Hub’s innovation division and is still in beta testing, a company spokesperson said.
The spokesperson cited a protocol that allows external developers to access its functionality, adding that the company plans to provide application programming interface access to the model “in the near future.”
“We aim to release more products soon.”
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Happy Horse marked Alibaba’s highest-scoring video product to date, pushing ByteDance’s famous Seedance 2.0 to second place. The company’s early efforts topped the list by about 20 places under the “Wan” brand.
The platform’s outstanding performance on benchmarks and mysterious background has created excitement and a guessing game among China’s AI and investor communities, with many linking it to Alibaba and pushing its stock price up to 8% on Wednesday.
Jefferies analyst Thomas Chong wrote in a note that Happy Horse is a “success” for Alibaba.
Video generation has proven to be a reliable source of revenue, making it capital-intensive and highly competitive for AI developers.
With OpenAI exiting the field in March, the opportunities for Chinese companies only get bigger. Most of the Artificial Analysis leaderboards are dominated by products from Chinese companies.
In the generated video samples posted by the benchmark provider, we found that Happy Horse performed well against Seadance. Bloomberg could not independently verify the sources of these videos.
In April, Hangzhou-based Alibaba released the latest version of its flagship video generator Wan, developed by the company’s Dogi Lab.
The company hasn’t talked publicly about supporting multiple teams working on AI creative tools in parallel, but CEO Eddie Wu has made AI development a priority in every part of his vast business.
Wu’s statement that China’s largest e-commerce company has made a decisive move towards AI and is now pursuing artificial general intelligence as its main goal made headlines.
In March, the company revamped its business structure with a focus on monetizing AI.
The company on Wednesday announced the creation of a new four-member technical committee comprised of top leaders, chaired by Wu. The group also elevated Dogi Research Institute, led by Zhou Jingren, former chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud, into its own business unit. bloomberg
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