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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the video model is based on Wan2.2.

Lots of activity around Wan lately. It’s nice to see flexible open models make a strong showing against the massively funded closed competitors like OpenAI and Runway.

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Discussed here:

Wan – Open-source alternative to VEO 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44928997 - Aug 2025 (38 comments)

They're the main open source privacy-preserving video models that VeniceAI has started offering with a convenient frontend. Ovi is one with image to video and there is also Wan 2.1 image to video, Wan 2.2 text to video. Wan 2.5 is available but it's routed in an anonymized fashion to the official provider. They're also much more affordable compared to the routed Kling, Veo, and Sora options.

And Google.

OpenAI wowed the world with a video model that was also a script writing, editing, dubbing, foley, and music model.

Kling still has the best proprietary video model, but Sora 2 is so smart that you don't need to edit anything if your target is social.

I don't see how Runway, Pika, or the rest of the purely foundation video model startups survive against the giants and the incredible open source Chinese models. They've got to be sweating bullets right now.

Everyone's also sleeping on xAI's high quality and insanely fast video model (10 second generations) that they're giving away completely for free without watermarks.

There's no moat on the technology, especially with China around. So the only moat is distribution. We're still in the crazy phase of serious changes and if you're betting too deep on one architecture, ah well... https://howlin-wang.github.io/svg/

This model is from Character AI and they have distribution. Although they open sourced it so no consideration for moat.

Its from Character AI but they used Wan, and MMaudio. I'm not sure their licenses disallow creating a closed model from their work for commercial purposed but either way they've done nothing with a true moat, they were merely first to the table for something this all-inclusive. Even apart from their efforts, assorted tools, all open, can be used to achieve these effects , but requires more techinical knowledge to setup, and each new gen would require a fair amount of reconfiguration of modules. But this is still significantly easier than similarly available tools 9-12 months ago. As an approach it also trades turnkey from tons of control and flexibility such that competent use will still often be simpler or get to a more refined result than Sora and others.

I think the moat here will ened up being value adds for convenience, tooling, IP licensing, integration into the rest of the pipeline used for content production, etc.

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