The gap closed in three days
We said the weights were promised and not published. They arrived on the third. Here is the correction, and here is the number that should be tracked from now on.
MiniMax published H3's weights on Hugging Face on 3 August, with bf16, INT8, pruned and NVFP4 builds and six official workflow templates.
Our correction, stated plainly
This morning we reported that the weights had been promised and not yet published, and proposed measuring the gap between announcement and availability. Both halves of that stand. The specific status was already out of date when we published it, and the follow-up belongs in the same place the original claim did.
Three days is a short gap by current standards and MiniMax deserves credit for closing it — particularly for shipping four numeric formats rather than a single reference checkpoint that only a well-funded lab can run.
The metric now has a data point
The proposal is simple and nobody is doing it: record, for every release described as open, the days between the API going live and the weights becoming downloadable. Publish the distribution.
H3 is three days. That is what a release process looks like. Three months would be a different product strategy wearing the same word. And a gap that never closes — a flagship previewed as open and quietly shelved — is the case that damages the term most, because it is only visible to someone still watching a year later.
Why timing is what is left to measure
Licence terms used to be where open releases quietly clawed back what the announcement gave: acceptable-use riders, user thresholds, field-of-use limits. That has substantially stopped. The strongest open-weight releases this year have carried MIT or near-MIT terms.
So the legal constraint is largely gone and the hardware constraint is unchanged. Which leaves timing as the one remaining variable a lab controls and an observer can check — and shipping quantised builds on day one is the other half of the same commitment, because a checkpoint nobody can run is available in name only.
ComfyUI Wiki — MiniMax H3 open weights land with native ComfyUI support → · Hugging Face — What is MiniMax H3 (Hailuo 3.0)? The omni-modal video model, explained → · TechCrunch — The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier →