Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup Minimax, one of China’s “AI tigers,” has released its Video-01 text-to-video model, which can generate highly accurate depictions of humans, down to their hand motions. Minimax unveiled the new tool Saturday at its inaugural developer conference in Shanghai.

Video-01 enables users to create 6-second 1280 x 720 resolution videos at 25 frames per second (fps) using text prompts, reportedly in about 2 minutes. At the conference, Minimax CEO Yan Junjie pointed out that this is only the first iteration of the model and that future updates will include the ability to generate video from images and edit those generated videos, per the South China Morning Post “We have indeed made significant progress in video model generation, and based on internal evaluations and scores, our performance is better than that of Runway in generating videos,” he told reporters.

To try Video-01 for yourself, head to the Video-01 website. While writing of this article, the site was inundated with users, so the video-generation process took closer to 5 minutes but did not require me to enter a mobile number or otherwise log in to use it. As with other leading video AIs like Kling and Runway, you can dictate cinematic camera movements in your text prompt. The resulting video quality was pretty good, strikingly lifelike, and did not present any significant visual hallucinations commonly found in similar free AI tools. The video is also downloadable as an .MP4 file.

Video-01 joins an increasingly crowded video-generation market, even without the highly anticipated arrival of OpenAI’s Sora. Two other “Tigers,” Shengshu AI and Zhipu AI (both of which are valued at more than $1 billion, released their own text-to-video tools in July, as did Kaishou Industries with Kling.AI. Byte Dance also recently released its Jimeng text-to-video app on the Apple and Android app stores, though it is only available to users in China. Stateside, Minimax will have to contend with the likes of Luma Labs’ Dream Machine and Runway’s Gen-3.