Alibaba’s HappyHorse (欢乐马) Tops Arena Video-Editing Rankings as Formal Release Nears

Leaderboard upset

HappyHorse-1.0 (欢乐马) has surged to the top of Arena’s newly created video-editing leaderboard, posting an Elo score of 1,299 and overtaking grok-image-video by 42 points and kling-o3-pro by 48. Arena’s video sublist only launched in March and currently ranks five models, but HappyHorse’s margin was decisive enough to end grok-image-video’s hold on first place. Who built the surprise winner? It is Alibaba (阿里巴巴) — or at least, that is what the company has now acknowledged.

Origin and rollout

HappyHorse’s official X account said the model “performs excellently” on video editing and that the team is in a final optimization sprint ahead of a formal launch — it has been reported that the release is planned for about two weeks from the announcement. The model’s Weibo account (@HappyHorse_AI) confirmed it comes from Alibaba ATH (阿里ATH), the group set up in March and overseen by group CEO Wu Yongming (吴泳铭), which brings together Tongyi Lab, the MaaS platform, Qianwen (千问), Wukong and other AI units. APPSO has reported that the video model work is led by Zheng Bo (郑波), an Alibaba vice president who previously ran advertising-algorithm efforts. Reportedly some users have already seen a HappyHorse 1.0 button in the Qianwen app, though the button was not visible in the latest public build and may be in a grey rollout.

Context: the domestic AI sprint

HappyHorse’s climb follows an earlier anonymous appearance atop Artificial Analysis’s text-to-video and image-to-video lists in early April — where it outscored ByteDance’s (字节跳动) Seedance 2.0 and sparked speculation about its provenance. That speculation is now largely settled, but the timing matters: Chinese tech groups are aggressively accelerating in multimodal and generative AI even as Western export controls and geopolitical scrutiny limit access to some cutting-edge hardware. The result is fiercer domestic competition and faster productization. Expect more benchmarking drama — and fast product rollouts — as the video-AI arms race heats up.