Video AI “H3 Max” makes 5-second videos in ~3 seconds

It is not only the program’s producers who decide what happens next on screen. fal.ai has launched “fal.live,” a livestream in which the storyline changes based on viewers’ suggestions and votes, creating an AI program that adopts the proposal receiving the most votes as the next video. Behind it is a dedicated site where users can try “MiniMax H3 Max,” which generates audio-enabled 480p, 5-second videos in about 3 seconds, for free.

H3 Max is a faster version of the video-generation model “MiniMax H3,” announced by Chinese AI company MiniMax and further trained by fal.ai. It accepts text or images as input and can create 5- to 15-second videos at 480p or 768p and 24fps. When generating from images, users can specify the first image as the opening scene and the second as the final scene, with the system generating footage to connect them. The original H3 combines text, images, video and audio to generate audio-enabled videos up to 2K and 15 seconds long, and also supports editing existing videos.

The free dedicated site can be tried without creating an account. Registered users can generate up to 5 videos per day for free. The API, which calls functions from external services, uses a pay-per-use pricing model: standard rates are $0.05 per second for 480p and $0.08 per second for 768p. For text input, users can choose from 6 aspect ratios.

The continuous livestream is powered by “H3 Max Director,” an experimental model tuned for long-duration generation based on H3 Max. It references up to 2 minutes of previous footage and creates the next video while preserving the context and flow established so far. fal.ai says H3 Max has about 35 times the processing capacity of H3 and is an average of 15 times faster than other models of comparable quality. It says 15-second videos can be generated in about 15 seconds.

So what changes? Projects that reflect viewers’ votes in the next short video can be tested without the long production process usually required while waiting for generation. MiniMax says the technology can also be used to create commercial content such as advertisements and games. However, the speeds and performance comparisons presented here come from fal.ai, and H3 Max’s open weights (a format in which a model’s weights are made public) have only reached the stage where a release policy has been indicated; the timing remains unclear.