Low‑cost 1080p AI video (Hailuo 02)

Artificial intelligence video tools turn text prompts into short clips, like a movie storyboard that renders itself. MiniMax’s Hailuo 02 is one of the cheaper versions now on the market, with a cited cost of about $0.28 for a 10-second 1080p clip. (ucstrategies.com) MiniMax introduced Hailuo 02 on June 18, 2025, and said the model generates native 1080p video in clips lasting 6 to 10 seconds. The company said artists used it to assemble a finished demo video over 1.5 days. (minimax.io) MiniMax said Hailuo 02’s main selling points are “instruction following” and “physics,” meaning the model is tuned to obey detailed prompts and keep motion believable in scenes like running, flipping, or camera movement. The company said the model uses a new architecture called Noise-aware Compute Redistribution and improves training and inference efficiency by 2.5 times. (minimax.io) That efficiency claim is tied to cost. MiniMax said it tripled the model’s parameter count and trained on four times more data than its predecessor without raising creator costs, while the UCStrategies write-up put the effective price at roughly $0.28 per video. (minimax.io) (ucstrategies.com) The benchmark picture is less clear than some marketing suggests. MiniMax said an early version of Hailuo 02 reached second place globally on Artificial Analysis’ Video Arena in 2025, but the current Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard viewed on April 12, 2026 lists Hailuo 02 Standard at No. 27 and Hailuo 02 Pro at No. 33. (minimax.io) (artificialanalysis.ai) That leaderboard also shows why the price claim gets attention. Artificial Analysis lists Hailuo 02 Standard at $2.80 per minute, compared with $12.00 per minute for Google Veo 3 and $13.20 per minute for Luma Labs Ray 3, although those tools differ in features, duration, and audio support. (artificialanalysis.ai) The practical limit is length. UCStrategies said Hailuo 02 caps output at 10 seconds, which fits product shots, social ads, and short B-roll, but makes longer narrative scenes harder to produce without stitching multiple clips together. (ucstrategies.com) MiniMax is pushing Hailuo as part of a broader multimodal business that spans text, speech, music, image, and video models. The company says it was founded in early 2022, and investor materials describe it as a global foundation-model company based in China. (minimax.io) (ir.minimax.io) The larger shift is that AI video pricing is starting to look more like cloud software pricing than studio budgeting. Hailuo 02’s pitch is simple: if a team only needs a realistic 10-second Full High Definition clip, it may no longer need to pay premium rates to get one. (ucstrategies.com)