Disambiguation
Four names, three companies, and a set of search results that routinely hands you the wrong model’s numbers.
MiniMax shipped a coding model called M3 and a video model called H3 two months apart. The video model is widely written as Hailuo 3.0, Hailuo 03 or Hailuo-03 — none of which MiniMax uses. And Kling O3, which looks almost identical to “Hailuo 03” in a search box, is not a MiniMax product at all. It comes from Kuaishou.
This page sorts out which name points at which model, and shows the checks that settle it in about ten seconds. Every claim below was taken from a vendor-controlled surface — official docs, release notes, the licence file, or the company’s own press release — not from an aggregator.
The short answer
Three models people are currently mixing up, and what each one actually does.
MiniMax
MiniMax M3
Writes text and code
A language model for coding, agent workflows and long-context work, released 1 June 2026 with a 1,000,000-token context window. It reads images and video. It does not make video.
API string MiniMax-M3
MiniMax
MiniMax H3
Makes video with sound
An omni-modal video model released 31 July 2026. Generates 4–15 second clips at up to 2K and 24 FPS with native stereo audio. This is the one people mean by “Hailuo 3.0”.
API string MiniMax-H3
Kuaishou
Kling O3
Makes video — different company
Kuaishou’s reference-led video model, announced 5 February 2026. Kuaishou’s own name for it is Video 3.0 Omni. No relationship to MiniMax or Hailuo.
Vendor name Video 3.0 Omni
The rule that resolves most of it: at MiniMax, M is text, H is video. One letter separates a coding model from a video generator, and the two live behind different API versions on the same host.
MiniMax M3 and MiniMax H3, side by side
Same vendor, same base URL, one letter apart. Everything else diverges.
| MiniMax M3 | MiniMax H3 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it produces | Text and code | Video with synchronised audio |
| Released | 1 June 2026 | 31 July 2026 |
| API model string | MiniMax-M3 |
MiniMax-H3 |
| Endpoint | /v1/chat/completionsor /anthropic/v1/messages |
/v2/video_generation |
| Call style | Synchronous chat completion | Asynchronous — create task, poll task_id, download |
| Context / prompt limit | 1,000,000 tokens | 7,000 characters |
| Accepts video as input | Yes — to understand it | Yes — as a style/motion reference |
| Outputs video | No | Yes |
| Hugging Face repo | MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3 |
MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 |
| Hugging Face task tag | Image-Text-to-Text | Image-Text-to-Video |
| Licence tag | minimax-community |
minimax-h3-community-license-agreement |
| Headline numbers you will find | SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal-Bench 2.1 66.0%, MCP Atlas 74.2% | Video-arena rankings — no coding benchmark exists for it |
Why M3 shows up in video searches at all. M3’s model card is tagged video. That tag describes video understanding — the model can watch a clip and write about it. Combined with a one-letter name difference, it is enough to put a coding model at the top of a video-model search.
Hailuo 3.0, Hailuo 03, Hailuo-03: one model, and none of those names
All three spellings point at MiniMax H3. None of them is the vendor’s name for it.
Hailuo is the app. MiniMax H3 is the model. The app does not name the model after itself — open hailuoai.video and the model picker reads “MiniMax H3”.
We checked four surfaces MiniMax controls. None of them uses Hailuo 3.0, Hailuo 03 or Hailuo-03:
| MiniMax-controlled surface | What it calls the model |
|---|---|
| Platform release notes | MiniMax H3 |
| Video generation documentation | MiniMax H3 · MiniMax-H3 |
| Hailuo AI web app | MiniMax H3 |
| Hugging Face model card | MiniMax H3 |
Where “Hailuo 03” came from — MiniMax renamed its own video line four times
The alias is not careless. It is a reasonable guess that MiniMax invalidated. Its own release notes show four naming schemes across four generations of a single product line:
| Date | Name MiniMax shipped | Scheme |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Feb 2025 | T2V-01-Director / I2V-01-Director |
Task code, zero-padded |
| 18 Jun 2025 | MiniMax-Hailuo-02 |
Brand, zero-padded |
| 28 Oct 2025 | MiniMax-Hailuo-2.3 |
Brand, dotted decimal |
| 31 Jul 2026 | MiniMax H3 |
Initial, bare integer |
Anyone following the June 2025 pattern would expect Hailuo-03 next. That is exactly what the community wrote — and it collides head-on with a Kuaishou model.
A third “3” inside the same lineup. MiniMax also shipped Music-3.0 on 16 July 2026, two weeks before H3. Since then “the new MiniMax 3 model” has had three live referents: M3 for text, Music-3.0 for music and H3 for video. Ask which modality before quoting a price or a score.
Kling O3 is a different model, from a different company
And Kuaishou does not call it O3 either.
Kling is developed by Kuaishou Technology, the Hong Kong-listed Chinese social platform. It has no connection to MiniMax, to Hailuo, or to the H3 line.
Kuaishou’s own announcement, dated Hong Kong, 5 February 2026, names four models: Video 3.0, Video 3.0 Omni, Image 3.0 and Image 3.0 Omni. The string “O3” does not appear anywhere in it. The model people call Kling O3 is Video 3.0 Omni.
The abbreviation is a back-formation, and a defensible one: Kuaishou does use O-numbering elsewhere. The same press release refers to “the ‘Elements’ feature from Kling Video O1” and to “the newly introduced Kling O1 and 2.6 series”. Third-party hosts then standardised on O3 — WaveSpeed, for instance, distributes it under IDs of the form kwaivgi/kling-video-o3-*. So the name is real in the market and absent from the vendor.
| MiniMax H3 | Kling O3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Company | MiniMax | Kuaishou Technology |
| Vendor’s own name | MiniMax H3 | Video 3.0 Omni |
| Announced | 31 July 2026 | 5 February 2026 |
| Clip length | 4–15 seconds | Up to 15 seconds |
| Native audio | Yes — 32 kHz stereo, 11 stable dialogue languages | Yes — multilingual, with accents and dialects |
| Open weights | Yes — with territorial restrictions | No |
Three different things are called “O3” right now
If a document says “O3” without a vendor next to it, it is ambiguous.
| Name | Company | What it is | Status of the name |
|---|---|---|---|
| o3 | OpenAI | Reasoning language model, released April 2025 | Official, lowercase |
| Kling O3 | Kuaishou | Video model — Video 3.0 Omni | Market shorthand; not used by Kuaishou |
| Hailuo 03 | MiniMax | Video model — MiniMax H3 | Community coinage; not used by MiniMax |
OpenAI’s o3 is the only one of the three its own vendor actually publishes under that name — and it was called o3 rather than o2 to avoid a trademark clash with the O2 mobile network.
If you came here looking for H3 benchmarks
The numbers at the top of the results are probably M3’s, and they measure something else entirely.
SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench and MCP Atlas are software-engineering and tool-use benchmarks. A video model cannot be scored on them, and MiniMax has never claimed a score on them for H3. If a page shows you “59.0%” next to the word H3, it has crossed the wires with M3.
H3 is evaluated the way video models are evaluated — blind side-by-side human preference, expressed as an Elo rating. On Artificial Analysis’s video arenas, H3 placed first in video editing and in the top three for both text-to-video and image-to-video shortly after launch. Those positions move as new models arrive, so treat any specific Elo you read as dated unless it carries a timestamp.
Buying rather than benchmarking? The same mix-up reaches procurement. “The new MiniMax model” is not a product — M3 is billed per token and H3 is billed per second of generated video. A quote built on the wrong one is not slightly wrong, it is priced on a different unit.
One more split, inside H3 itself
“MiniMax H3” names both a hosted product and a smaller open-weight release. They are not the same thing.
MiniMax describes H3 as a system of three parts: H3-Context-IR, which interprets and restructures complex multimodal prompts; H3-Base, which generates at 768p; and H3-Regenerate-2K, which lifts that output to 2K. The open-weight release covers the base generation variants — H3-Base-FL2VA for first/last-frame work and H3-Base-Ref2VA for omni-reference work.
The practical consequence: “2K” is an attribute of the full hosted system, not of the checkpoint you download. The model card puts the default shorter side at 768 pixels and attributes 2K to the regeneration stage.
The open weights are not open everywhere. The MiniMax H3 Community Licence Agreement, dated 2 August 2026, limits its own scope to an “Applicable Territory” defined as worldwide excluding the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America. If you are reading this from any of those four, the licence does not grant you rights to run the weights locally — the hosted API is a separate arrangement. This is a materially different licence from the minimax-community terms on M3, and another reason not to treat the two models as one release.
The ten-second test
Four checks that survive the next round of renaming.
1. Read the task tag, not the name
On Hugging Face, MiniMax-M3 is tagged Image-Text-to-Text and MiniMax-H3 is tagged Image-Text-to-Video. The tag describes what comes out. It cannot be spun.
2. Read the endpoint
A request to /v1/chat/completions is a language model. A request to /v2/video_generation is a video model. Same host, different API version.
3. Check the billing unit
Priced per token? Text model. Priced per second of output? Video model. This is the fastest check in a quote or an invoice, and it needs no documentation at all.
4. Name the company before the number
“O3” is ambiguous across three vendors. “Kuaishou’s Video 3.0 Omni” and “MiniMax H3” are not. Put the company in front of every model name in anything you plan to act on.
Frequently asked
Is MiniMax H3 the same as MiniMax M3?
No. MiniMax H3 is a video generation model released on 31 July 2026. MiniMax M3 is a language model for coding and agent work released on 1 June 2026. They come from the same company and their API strings differ by one letter, but M3 outputs text and H3 outputs video.
Is Hailuo 3.0 the same as MiniMax H3?
Yes. Hailuo 3.0, Hailuo 03 and Hailuo-03 all refer to MiniMax H3. Hailuo AI is the consumer app the model runs in; MiniMax H3 is the model’s actual name. MiniMax does not use any of the Hailuo 3 spellings on its release notes, its API documentation, the Hailuo app itself or its Hugging Face model card.
Is Kling O3 related to Hailuo 03?
No. Kling is made by Kuaishou Technology and has no relationship to MiniMax or Hailuo. The two names look similar in a search box, which is the entire source of the confusion. Kuaishou’s own name for the model is Video 3.0 Omni; “Kling O3” is shorthand used by third-party hosting platforms.
What are MiniMax H3’s benchmark scores?
H3 is scored on video arenas rather than coding benchmarks. Shortly after launch it ranked first for video editing and top three for text-to-video and image-to-video on Artificial Analysis. If you are seeing SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench or MCP Atlas figures attributed to H3, those belong to MiniMax M3, which is a coding model.
Can I download and run MiniMax H3 locally?
The weights are published on Hugging Face at MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3, but the MiniMax H3 Community Licence Agreement dated 2 August 2026 defines its Excluded Territories as the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America. Users in those regions are outside the licence’s Applicable Territory for local deployment. The download also covers the base generation variants rather than the full hosted system, so 2K output is not part of what you run locally.
Why did MiniMax stop using the Hailuo name for its video models?
MiniMax has not published a reason. What its release notes show is that the video line has carried four different naming schemes in four generations: T2V-01-Director in February 2025, MiniMax-Hailuo-02 in June 2025, MiniMax-Hailuo-2.3 in October 2025 and MiniMax H3 in July 2026. The Hailuo 03 spelling is a reasonable extrapolation of the June 2025 pattern into a generation that was renamed.
Related Kingy records
Sources
Vendor-controlled surfaces, read directly on 4 August 2026.
- MiniMax platform release notes — release dates and shipped names for M3, H3, Music-3.0, MiniMax-Hailuo-2.3, MiniMax-Hailuo-02 and the 01-Director models.
- MiniMax video generation documentation — model name
MiniMax-H3, endpoint, resolutions, durations, reference-input limits, 7,000-character prompt cap. - MiniMax model invocation documentation — model name
MiniMax-M3, 1,000,000-token context, endpoints. - MiniMax: MiniMax M3 — vendor-reported SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.1 and MCP Atlas figures.
- MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 model card — task tag, 24 FPS, 32 kHz stereo, 11 dialogue languages, the three-module system and the H3-Base variants.
- MiniMax H3 Community Licence Agreement — licence date and the Excluded Territories definition.
- MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3 model card — task tag and
minimax-communitylicence tag. - Kuaishou Technology: Kling AI Launches 3.0 Model — 5 February 2026 dateline, the four official model names, and the Kling Video O1 references.
- Hailuo AI — the app’s own model picker, showing “MiniMax H3”.
- Morphic: MiniMax H3 (Hailuo 3.0) — the write-up that flagged the H3/M3 search crossover and the Kling O3 spelling collision.