MiniMax H3 was announced as open source — the weights have not appeared
H3 was announced on 3 August as an open-source release, with weights promised for early August. As of this writing they have not been published. The model is live in the platform API and the Hailuo consumer app. Announced-open and available-open are turning into two different dates, and the gap between them is where the label loses meaning.
We covered this release as open-sourced when it was announced. That was premature, and the correction matters more than the original: a model is open-weight when the weights are downloadable, not when a company says they will be. The distinction is the entire practical value of the term.
None of this suggests bad faith. MiniMax gave a timeframe and the timeframe has not expired by much. But the pattern is now common enough across labs — announce open, ship API, publish weights later — that the announcement date has stopped being informative and the publication date is the only one worth recording.
The useful metric going forward is the gap itself. Not whether a lab calls itself open, but how many days separate the endpoint from the download, and whether that number is trending up. Some labs are shipping both on the same day, which makes the comparison fair to run.
AIBase — Visual large models receive a major open-source announcement → · DataNorth AI — MiniMax H3 release: omni-modal 2K video model → · Cornford and Cross — Inside MiniMax H3: sound features and the meaning of open in AI →