SITUATION EXPLAINED: MiniMax released H3 with open weights, and it's already #1 in video editing. • Priced at $7.80 per minute of 2K video, against Seedance 2.0 at $22.45 and Kling 3.0 at $20.16 • It ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis for video editing, #2 for text-to-video behind Gemini Omni Flash, and #3 for image-to-video • H3 takes text, images, video, and audio in a single context and generates 5-15 second clips at native 2K, 24fps, with native stereo audio • MiniMax is releasing the weights under its Community License within days, which would make it the strongest open-weights video model by a wide margin • It launched the same week ByteDance rolled out Seedance 2.5, which now generates 30-second 4K video from a single prompt • Seedance 2.5's face consistency across a full 30 seconds is the visible jump, earlier models drifted into a different face partway through • Voices are still the obvious tell, the video reads as real long before the audio does • Smaller labs building purpose-built video models are now beating frontier labs at this specific task @theojaffee: "This is gonna be one of the biggest examples of things that people are gonna do with these models, historical simulations, basically. Nostalgia videos for zoomers."