The Creator of Kling Returns to Alibaba and Builds Another Dark Horse
The article discusses the rise of HappyHorse-1.0, an AI video generation model developed by Alibaba, which topped the Artificial Analysis leaderboard in both text-to-video and image-to-video categories in April 2026. The model was created under the leadership of Zhang Di, who returned to Alibaba in November 2025 after working at Kuaishou, where he led the development of the Kling model. HappyHorse is open-source and commercially available, similar to Alibaba's Qwen model.
Zhang Di's background includes extensive experience in large-scale data systems and machine learning at Alibaba and Kuaishou, which contributed to the rapid development of HappyHorse within just five months. The model uses a 15-billion-parameter transformer architecture with native multimodal training, supporting multiple languages and lip-sync capabilities. It also focuses on reducing inference time and cost, making it practical for commercial use.
The primary application of HappyHorse is in e-commerce, where it can generate product videos to enhance user engagement and conversion rates by creating contextual and personalized content. This aligns with Alibaba's strengths in commerce, advertising, and data feedback loops. The model's success with open-source approach contrasts with challenges faced by closed-source models like OpenAI's Sora (shut down due to high costs) and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 (paused over copyright issues). HappyHorse represents a strategic move for Alibaba to integrate AI video generation into its core business ecosystems.
marsbit04/13 05:10
