Welcome back to the AI For Humans newsletter!

We took a much-needed break last week and are reimagining AI For Humans a little bit to make it more useful to you, the human, as we navigate the next stage of AI.

If you’d like to learn more about our new direction, be sure to check out this episode of the podcast. And if you want to hear where AI is going next, check out the news about OpenAI’s incoming Astra model later in this very newsletter!

But first: Fal unleashed a modified version of the new MiniMax H3 AI video model called MiniMax H3 MAX, which generates AI video clips almost as fast as you can write the prompts. It’s opened up an entirely NEW conversation about what AI video is capable of and where we go from here.

For now, you can try this crazy free model here, but the implications are ginormous and people are already building wild things with it.

Let’s get into it!

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Quick backstory for those who missed it: MiniMax (the Chinese lab behind the Hailuo video models) released MiniMax H3 at the end of July. It’s an open-weights video model that can generate up to 15-second 2K clips with native stereo audio, which was already a pretty big deal on its own.

Then Fal, the AI infrastructure company that serves a ton of these models, took H3 and made it FAST. They post-trained the model for better prompt-following and visual quality, built a custom serving engine alongside it, and run the whole thing on NVIDIA’s monster new GB200 systems.

The result is a 5-second video in about 3 seconds. That’s roughly 35x faster than the official MiniMax version of the same model.

Maybe the craziest part of the whole thing is that it doesn’t seem to be a quality trade-off.

In head-to-head human preference tests, H3 Max ranked #1 in overall quality, prompt understanding AND aesthetics against twelve leading models (including Google’s Gemini Omni Flash, Kling 3 and Veo 3.1), and independent rankings from Artificial Analysis and Design Arena back that up.

The big difference here is SPEED. Most AI video generators force you to wait for your results, leaving you to either queue up more videos or wander off to something else. It can greatly drag on the creative process.

Of course, when you can generate nearly instant AI video, the first place people went was Rick & Morty’s “Interdimensional Cable”.

Fal’s own engineer Rehan Sheikh built exactly that (hooking chat up to prompting) and tried streaming it on Twitch, which almost immediately took it down over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He then tried posting it on many, many other streaming sites, all of whom ALSO took it down.

MiniMax H3 has a LOT of IP and real actors in its training data (as you can see from my Toms video above), and part of the problem is that (of course) the first thing people want to make are videos with famous characters (much like early Sora).

Enter Pieter Levels, aka Levels.io, who partnered with Fal to create a self-hosted stream of always-on infinite AI slop (it’s literally called that) with pretty hard guardrails against IP and other issues. Pieter estimates it’s costing about $4K a day to run, and Fal is clearly taking a bath serving this model right now to get their name out there.

But… there is something magical about seeing a prompt appear in this weird, random way.

We’ve talked here a bunch of times about a future where everyone can generate their own stories with AI, and whether AI might just create them on its own.

I personally don’t think people will want AI-only stories, but time will tell.

What’s fascinating about MiniMax H3 MAX is that when you drastically cut the time it takes to generate AI video, you start to open up new ways of looking at the medium.

People will always want long-form stories that make them feel something specific, and I think that’s where us humans get to keep our expertise for a bit.

But I wonder if there aren’t other interesting ways to think about instant-on AI video: as a reflection of a person’s mood, or a specific feeling in the moment.

I don’t really need to see what the masses want to create, but I am interested in a select group of people playing with weird real-time storylines across multiple universes.

Either way, it’s a big step forward for AI video and worth paying attention to. Go at least try it while it’s still free.

See you next week!

-Gavin

This Week on AI For Humans: How To Use MiniMax H3 Max & Ox Alpha 👇

We’ve talked a ton here about how using complicated tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets you, the normal human, do stuff only programmers could do before.

Now Epic has integrated MCP directly into their Fortnite building engine, letting AI agents like Claude and OpenAI’s Codex build Fortnite levels with normal human language.

Immature Gamer (a good friend and an expert on the Fortnite ecosystem) showed off how easy it is to build something relatively complicated once everything is connected:

You might be asking: “Gavin, why do I care about Fortnite? My kids still play it but honestly, it’s not a big part of my life.”

Well, UEFN is a hands-on sneak peek at ‘world building’ tools in a simplified space, and if you make something interesting there, you have a potential audience of hundreds of millions of players.

Sounds like a worthy weekend experiment to me.