--- title: "Hailuo 02 out-ranked Veo 3 — can MiniMax's budget video model keep the crown?" date: 2026-10-02 category: Generative Media site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-aigc-hailuo-02-video-cost language: en --- # Hailuo 02 out-ranked Veo 3 — can MiniMax's budget video model keep the crown? > MiniMax's Hailuo 02 shocked the AI video world in mid-2025 by ranking second on the Artificial Analysis arena, ahead of Google's Veo 3, while claiming record cost efficiency. The Shanghai lab behind it is now listed in Hong Kong — and still pricing to win. A gymnast twists through a double layout, toes pointed, water bottle on the vault table perfectly still. The clip fooled plenty of viewers — and it came out of a text prompt, generated by a Shanghai startup most Western audiences had barely heard of. ## The ranking nobody expected When MiniMax released Hailuo 02 in June 2025, the conversation around Chinese video generators was still "cheap but behind." That framing didn't survive the leaderboard. Hailuo 02 entered the Artificial Analysis video arena — a blind, human-preference benchmark — and took the number-two spot, ahead of Google's Veo 3 and Kuaishou's Kling, trailing only ByteDance's Seedance at the time. Chinese state media outlet CNR and Huanqiu Wang both reported the ranking, which MiniMax highlighted as its first head-to-head win over a top US frontier model in video. What made the result unusual was where it came from: an architecture designed to spend less compute, not more. ## The "impossible triangle" Video generation has long faced a three-way trade-off — quality, efficiency, cost — where pushing any two means sacrificing the third. MiniMax's answer is an architecture it calls Noise-aware Compute Redistribution (NCR). Instead of applying compute evenly across every frame, the model shifts resources toward the hardest parts of a scene: fast-moving objects, complex reflections, fine facial detail. Per MiniMax, the gains were concrete: - **2.5x improvement** in both training and inference efficiency - **3x more parameters** and **4x more training data** than the previous Hailuo generation, while keeping costs under control - **Native 1080p output** — generated at full resolution, not upscaled — with clips up to 10 seconds The company says its launch demo video was produced by just three artists in a day and a half. That claim is MiniMax's own and hard to audit, but the broader efficiency story is consistent with what independent benchmark users observed: physics-heavy motion — diving, splashing, tumbling — that many rivals render poorly. Clips of diving cats and acrobats generated by Hailuo 02 spread widely on social media in mid-2025. ## Then it cut the price again In late 2025 MiniMax followed up with Hailuo 2.3, which the company says brings more fluid body movement and more natural micro-expressions. It also claims the update "sets a new global record for video model cost-effectiveness" at an unchanged price, and that a faster variant, Hailuo 2.3 Fast, cuts batch-creation costs by up to half. These are company statements, not independent benchmarks — but the direction is verifiable in the market: MiniMax competes openly on price and has said Hailuo 02's launch pricing was "the most open access and affordable pricing in the industry." The strategy is deliberate. MiniMax is one of the few Chinese model labs whose revenue already skews international — the company reported that overseas markets contributed more than 70% of sales in 2025 — so it is pricing Hailuo to win creators in the US and Europe, not just at home. ## The lab behind the model MiniMax was founded in early 2022 by Yan Junjie (闫俊杰), a former SenseTime vice-president. By September 2025 it reported more than 212 million individual users across over 200 countries. Its model line spans text (MiniMax M2), speech, music and video, with the consumer-facing Hailuo AI app and a developer API platform. In January 2026 the company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as 0100.HK, priced at HK$165 per share — the top of its marketed range — and raised about US$619 million (≈HK$4.8 billion, at roughly 7.8 HKD/USD). Shares roughly doubled on debut, making it one of the year's most watched AI listings and capping a four-year journey from founding to IPO. ## Why the cost angle matters Hailuo's significance is less any single leaderboard position and more what it demonstrated: that algorithm and architecture efficiency can substitute, at least partly, for brute-force compute. That matters for Chinese AI firms operating under export controls on advanced chips — and for anyone building video products on thin margins. If a mid-sized lab can reach frontier-adjacent quality at a fraction of the generation cost, the economics of AI video — ads, microdramas (短剧), e-commerce content — change faster than most production pipelines can adapt. ## What readers can do now - **If you produce video content**, run the same prompt through Hailuo AI, Kling and a Western frontier model and compare cost per usable clip — the price gap is often the real story, not the leaderboard. - **If you benchmark AI video tools**, treat arena rankings as snapshots: check the date of any "number one" claim before repeating it. - **If you track China's AI economy**, watch whether MiniMax's overseas-heavy revenue (over 70%) holds now that it has public-market scrutiny. ## Honest limitations - The "number two" ranking reflects a specific mid-2025 snapshot of the Artificial Analysis arena; leaderboards move weekly, and newer models from Google, Runway, Kuaishou and ByteDance have since shuffled the order. Blind-preference Elo scores measure what voters like, not objective physical fidelity. - Efficiency figures (2.5x, 3x parameters, 4x data), pricing claims and demo timelines are MiniMax's own disclosures and have not been independently audited. MiniMax remains loss-making, and whether price leadership survives its own capital burn is an open question; user and revenue figures come from company statements around its IPO. - This article draws on CNR (央广网), Huanqiu Wang, Sina Finance, the Southeast University alumni association announcement and third-party tool reviews for the viral-clips context. Currency conversion uses ≈7.8 HKD/USD. This is current to 2 October 2026 and is not investment advice. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-aigc-hailuo-02-video-cost Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.