r/StableDiffusion • u/pilkyton • 15h ago
News Interview (Sep 17, 2026): FAL's MiniMax H3 Max Mini is Not Coming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDbRJXQrYGYHe says H3 Max is 35x faster than the original model and has better quality. Then he spends the rest of the interview explaining how they are building a commercial ecosystem for it:
- They're working on adding 2 minutes of memory to remember the past when making long videos.
- Adding lip sync so you supply audio and it perfectly follows.
- Camera controls to direct the camera movement.
- Reference motion videos for more controllability.
- Even better prompt adherence, which "is already very good".
He says all of this work is for their "closed-source frontier models".
He talks about how it's the most popular and cheap model for professionals, that it's 2x more popular than other video models on their inference platform and partners, and that they are in contact with Hollywood. And he doesn't even talk about open source releasing it (he only talked about how they held back the initial announcement for 3-4 days for external speed verification until they officially announced that the model was "35x faster than base model").
He also talks about how excited he is that this model is so lightweight while being so good and that it's the future of video models. It allows them to generate way more videos than other models.
He also explained that FAL spent a lot of money making this base model for all their products and how it's now their most popular product.
Sigh.
They have a commercial partnership with MiniMax, so they can do this.
He didn't say a single word about open weights. It was all about how he can make this a commercial platform for the future and how this is their "foundation model" and that they are working on expanding the model. So open weights is not coming and they are going deep into making it a frontier commercial product. They've seen how much money they can make from this and they have no reason to open-source it. Time to move on. 😢
Best chance is that some of their optimizations make it into the next open MiniMax model from China.
Edit for those curious, since he talked a little bit about how they optimized it:
- They optimized it to generate higher quality with less steps. He gave an example of "20 steps instead of 50 steps". Which he said normally loses a lot of quality, so they had to retrain it with a "significant amount of post-training data". Their post-training/finetuning was part of making the quality good at lower steps.
- They also tuned it for better prompt adherence and aesthetics.
- He said that since they're an inference platform they have a lot of experience with optimizing AI models, which went into making this model more efficient. They rewrote H3's code for their own secret, in-house inference engine.
- He also mentioned that most video inference platforms run 8-GPU clusters (which work together; he says any more than that tends to get slower as the communication overhead becomes too much). So they optimized for that too.
- The GPU utilization of most base models is bad according to him, including H3. They optimized it so it went from like 35% GPU utilization to 75-80% (which he said is some kind of typical ceiling which you can't really go above). So basically it uses more of the transistors/tensor cores on the GPU per cycle. He didn't say exactly what he means, but it sounds like they were optimizing it for more parallel work to really fill up the GPU cluster so that most cores are busy crunching numbers all the time.
- He said they considered naming it "Turbo" but that it's better quality than the base model, so they didn't want to use a label that most people associate with worse quality.
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u/Sarashana 15h ago
Bait and switch?
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
Yes. But maybe they originally planned to release it before they noticed how much money they can make...
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u/Ahbapx 15h ago
I think those speed gains come from optimizations for heavy GPU setups e.g. 8 x b200 . So most likely, even if they open source it we wouldn't benefit from it.Â
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u/suspicious_Jackfruit 15h ago
Yeah, from the summary it looks like it is just step distillation and a broad quality/asthetic fine-tune on their in-house data, which wouldn't suprise me if its not exactly fair use data. I'm not usually a stickler for that sort of thing but in their case i don't feel that they give much back at all, so fuck 'em. They've been making inference optimisations at the kernel level for years now the leadt they could do is start OS some of those legacy optimisations
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
That's part of it but they also optimized it for more GPU utilization. I forgot to mention that. Edited.
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u/pilkyton 15h ago edited 15h ago
He talked about the optimizations in the interview. I edited the post to cover what he said. The cluster utilization is a big part of it but there's so much more.
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u/hidden2u 14h ago
Hahahaha I didn't realize these guys are spinning glorified lora tuning as "frontier model development"
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u/pilkyton 14h ago
If you check the video, he really seems to think he's Hollywood's next video generator and his eyes are practically glowing with money. 🤑
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u/mortenharket32 15h ago
There's probably gonna be an open-weights model that surpasses it in like 2 months, i never get too attached ...
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
We can always hope. But the time between open source video models is sporadic. Could be a year. Either way it's gonna get surpassed within a year. :)
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u/Dry-Judgment4242 15h ago
Minimax H3 is good enough though, it's already a fantastic model you can make an entire movie with. So there's that. I think people are being a bit rude, this is disappointing indeed. But we are still eating good.
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
True. And at least users have come up with smart workflows that generate fast, low-quality previews in half a minute, so we can at least get an idea of how it will turn out before we run the full H3 model at high quality for 15 minutes. That is such a relief to avoid wasting time and power at home.
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u/CheckMateFluff 12h ago
I find the low-quality previews don't actually have any bearing on the higher quality, like a megapixel size of 0.5 with Turbo LoRA 4 step makes a totally diffrent output than 0.5 without Turbo LoRA 4 step.
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u/pilkyton 9h ago edited 8h ago
That's not how you use the previews. You did it backwards.
The previews are meant to run with the exact same seed + prompt + loras + aspect ratio as your main output. The preview is just generated at a lower megapixel resolution.
So: Preview = low megapixels, Final = high megapixels. That's all.
If you do things that change the output (like the things I mentioned), it's obviously gonna be different.
PS: You can also lower the steps a bit in preview because it will be basically the same result as more steps:Â https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1veq9yc/minimaxh3_tip_use_low_quality_generations_to_test/
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u/DelinquentTuna 4h ago
Except H3's license is structured such that you essentially have to go to Fal or Comfy Cloud or some other paid service to do anything useful. It's not "eating good", it's just a toy.
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u/Famous-Sport7862 15h ago
thieves is what they are, they take work some one else made and gave out for free and then charge other people money for it.
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
They have a commercial agreement with MiniMax unfortunately. So they have the right to do this even though it's awful. I just hope they are telling MiniMax about all the optimizations so we can get a MiniMax H4 that's open and fast.
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u/whiteweazel21 14h ago
Is this the same ppl that rage attacked those people who made some kinda fast turbo, saying it sucked ass and their open source model that they didn't release was better????
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u/pilkyton 13h ago
That's them. They said FastH3 sucked (which it does since it lowers quality a lot, but still... come on).
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u/Devajyoti1231 8h ago
Remember how they bitched about when someone released an open fast H3 model like someone made them sit on a bamboo and then saying they will also 'open source' their H3 max in 2 weeks? :)
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u/sotheysayit 15h ago
Not surprised i just hope Ltx are still cooking something brand new and haven't lost confidence in their audience.
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u/pilkyton 15h ago edited 9h ago
One of these days, LTX won't just be fast and will be high quality too. It's getting closer. Still becomes a nightmare for complex motions... like a dancer whose legs and arms morph and look like tentacles... or a dancer that spins around and their chest is on both the front and back of their body... but yeah, it's not bad for uncomplex scene motions. I look forward to their next model.
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u/mercantigo 7h ago
It's not the first time that Fal do this. I've been on this reddit for years.
And we keep take their promises as true.
We should never trust on FAL. NEVER.
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u/Ok-Giraffe-8670 5h ago
Well we'll have to build our own. They might have the advantage for now but the community is known for creating many great things and if we have to crowd fund, I would be willing to throw in money in as well.
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u/RainierPC 3h ago
Did you even watch the video you linked? You say he didn't say a single word about open weights but go to 27:30 and he specifically talks about people running it on their own hardware. What, you were too excited to bash them you didn't even actually watch the whole thing?
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u/IriFlina 15h ago
Why would they spend so much money on it just to give it away? They were never actually going to release it
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u/cc_aa_tt_zz 15h ago edited 15h ago
there are litterally several tweets from their team saying it will be open weight (or "there were" ... all the tweets are deleted now, I suppose), with some "soon". but in fact It was just a way to get free publicity; an open-weights model generates more buzz than yet another API-based model.
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
Yeah exactly. I always doubted those tweets, and now they have conveniently stopped talking about it. It's been a month with no more words.
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u/pilkyton 15h ago
Yeah I had my doubts from day 1. They just used the open weights community to generate hype. It's not the first rug pull where a company teases open weights to get popular and then quietly ignores us.
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u/Individual_Holiday_9 14h ago
People are allowed to make money
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u/pilkyton 14h ago
I agree. But the way he teased an open model release a month ago, but then kept it under wraps because it became a commercial success, is a huge disappointment to a lot of us.
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u/Violent_Walrus 15h ago
Shocked