Happy Horse Confirmed as Alibaba Project — Public Release Within One Week

The two-day mystery surrounding Happy Horse 1.0 has been resolved. Multiple Chinese media outlets — including Sina Finance, Titanium Media (TMTPost), and AIBase — have confirmed that the model was developed by Alibaba's Taotian Group Future Life Lab, led by Zhang Di, formerly the Vice President of Kuaishou and the technical lead behind Kling (the competing AI video model).

What We Now Know

Happy Horse 1.0 has already been deployed internally on Alibaba's Bailian platform (百炼, Alibaba's enterprise AI model service). A public release is expected within approximately one week — putting the likely date around mid-April 2026.

The model will be fully open-sourced, including the base model, distilled model, super-resolution module, and inference code — all with commercial-use rights.

The Zhang Di Connection

Zhang Di's involvement is particularly significant. As the former VP of Kuaishou and the person behind Kling's AI video technology, he brings deep expertise in large-scale video generation. His move to Alibaba's Taotian Group and the subsequent creation of Happy Horse suggests Alibaba is making a serious push into AI video generation — leveraging talent from a direct competitor.

Market Reaction

The confirmation sent Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares up nearly 3%in early trading on April 10. Analysts noted that Happy Horse's #1 ranking on the AI Video Arena, combined with Alibaba's infrastructure and distribution capabilities, could give the company a significant competitive advantage in AI-generated content.

Performance Breakdown by Category

Detailed benchmark data shows Happy Horse's performance varies by task type:

Social Media Clue

An additional detail that helped confirm the Alibaba connection: Happy Horse's newly registered social media accounts on overseas platforms were found to have Alibaba Group as their first follower — a detail spotted by Sina Finance reporters that further solidified the link.

What Happens Next

With the public release expected within a week, the AI developer community is preparing for a major event. Key things to watch:

• Weight release — Full model weights (base + distilled + super-res) should become downloadable
• Alibaba Bailian API— Commercial API access through Alibaba's cloud platform
• Community benchmarks — Independent testing beyond the Arena blind test will reveal real-world strengths and weaknesses
• Ecosystem development — Fine-tuning, quantization, and consumer GPU support from the open-source community

Updated Timeline