Anonymous "HappyHorse-1.0" model vaults to top of benchmarks, sparks origin hunt

Surprise leaderboard upset

An anonymous video-generation model calling itself HappyHorse-1.0 rocketed to the top of Artificial Analysis on Tuesday, scoring an eye‑watering 1,347 Elo in the "text-to-video" pure-visual category — a full 74 points ahead of Seedance 2.0 from ByteDance (字节跳动). That margin is extraordinary: the combined gap from second to nineteenth on the leaderboard barely equals HappyHorse’s lead. The test platform uses blind two‑choice votes from ordinary users, a setup meant to prevent score manipulation, so the result immediately set the AI community buzzing.

Who built it?

Who is behind HappyHorse? Nobody has claimed it. It provides no public API and remains anonymous on the platform. It has been reported that some Chinese netizens have linked the project to Alibaba (阿里)’s Taotian Future Life Lab (淘天未来生活实验室) and to a team led by Zhang Di (张迪), a former lead on Kuaishou (快手)’s Kling; other guesses include DeepSeek and Xiaomi (小米)’s MiMo efforts, or an independent startup. Reportedly a website — https://happyhorseai.net/ — surfaced, but the claim is unverified and the team has not publicly confirmed authorship. Notably, HappyHorse trails Seedance on the combined "video + audio" ranking, suggesting an audio weakness despite its visual dominance.

Wider implications

Why does this matter? China’s AI landscape is highly competitive, with recent multimodal pushes from ByteDance (Seedance 2.0), Alibaba (Wan 2.7‑Video), Kuaishou (Kling 3.0) and Kunlun Wanwei (昆仑万维)’s SkyReels V4. Given typical development cycles, many observers find it unlikely one of those vendors quietly produced a radically superior base model in days. It has been reported that Artificial Analysis’ convention is for anonymous entries that attract attention to be formally claimed within about a week — so a reveal may be imminent. Against a backdrop of U.S. export controls and chip sanctions that complicate access to top hardware, breakthroughs like this will draw extra scrutiny from both engineers and policymakers.