MiniMax Opens a 4K Image Model
Open weights at sixty to seventy percent of the going rate, with a video model already at 25 million downloads a month.
MiniMax released H3-Image with open weights on 12 November 2026, covering text-to-image, reference-guided generation and image editing, with generation up to 4096 by 4096 pixels in about ten seconds and support for as many as sixteen reference images. Pricing is positioned at roughly 50% to 70% of comparable tools, and the weights are on Hugging Face. Separately, chief executive Yan Junjie said the company’s H3 video model has become the most downloaded open-weight model worldwide at about 25 million downloads a month, with roughly 300 derivative models built by outside developers within two weeks of release. For prior context, the highest download figure previously achieved by a Chinese model was in the hundreds of thousands, so this is a change of order, not of degree. The commercial consequence is that enterprises can put 4K generation inside their own asset pipelines and review chains rather than sending every image to a third-party API.
