The ranking comes from the Artificial Analysis arena, where people blind-rate rival clips. Google’s Gemini Omni Flash sits first. Every one of the next nine is Chinese: MiniMax’s H3, ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, two builds of Alibaba’s Wan, two of its HappyHorse, two of Kuaishou’s Kling, and Skywork’s SkyReels.
One of them arrived as a mystery. Alibaba’s HappyHorse, a roughly 15-billion-parameter open model, debuted anonymously in April and shot to the top before the company claimed it. Add ShengShu’s Vidu and a long tail of startups, and the field runs deep. The tools already feed ad agencies, studios and a booming microdrama industry.
China filled a gap the US left open. OpenAI shut down Sora in March, and Anthropic never entered. Google, with Gemini and Veo, is the main American holdout.
Why video is more than video
The bigger story is where video leads, and that is the case Bloomberg Opinion’s Catherine Thorbecke makes. To fake a convincing clip, a model has to learn a little physics. It needs a rough sense of motion, causality and how objects behave. That skill is the seed of a “world model.”
