The Next Frontier of AI Video Is Control

[upbeat music] Generative media is along with the coding agent market, what we call is token market fit. Everyone's waiting for a large consumer moment in AI. I believe H3 Max makes it possible.

Were you surprised by the speed up and the gain you could get from post-training this model?

We have a version called H3 Max Turbo that's public that can generate like a five-second video in like one point five seconds. From a cost standpoint, it's also like two X less.

People starting creating these beautiful scenes using an LLM model, GPT Astra in Blender, and all of a sudden it unlocked a whole new workflow for Hollywood and professional people.

We have been very, very focused towards speed, performance, quality, and now we have a really good base model. The next month or two is gonna be fully focused on-

What happens when AI video becomes fast enough to generate in real time? a16z General Partner Jennifer Lee sits down with Fal.ai co-founder Gorkem Mirdseven and head of engineering Batuhan Taskaya to discuss H3 Max and the rapidly changing generative video stack. They unpack how post-training and systems optimization made video generation significantly faster, opening up new experiences where video can run continuously, remember previous scenes, and respond to direction as it plays. But speed is only part of the story. They also discuss the push toward greater control over camera angles, lighting, characters, and motion, and why those tools could make generative video more useful for professional creative workflows.

Welcome, Gorkem, Batuhan, to our podcast again. We did the last one last year. This is long overdue, and we have such an exciting model to talk about, which is Fal's H3 Max. The day when it came out, I was calling it, it's really in the league of its own. Like, it's so funny to see the benchmarks where you have the dot of this model on the far left or far right, and then everything else is on the other half.

And, and that graph is actually log scale.

[laughing]

[laughing]

It's actually further, but we had to fit it in. We had to do log scale. Yeah.

That is hilarious.

The time portion, the quality is not, yeah.

For sure.

Yeah.

The internet noticed, for sure.

Yeah.

There are so many viral tweets about it. Like people really played around with this model. Maybe just give us the backstory of what inspired you to post-train this open weight model from Minimax, and how did you get the quality and speed to-

Yeah

... where it is?

F-first of all, the Minimax H3 model is the first truly open source, very capable, like latest generation video model out there. So even though we work with some of the other model labs to run inference for them, we never had this capability, like had the right to add this capability on top of it. So when Minimax came up with their very capable open source model that is truly last generation, can take references, like very familiar architecture to any other video model, we thought this is a great opportunity to go all in and see what like we can do. And again, we did like many different things that we are gonna talk about that combined gave the results that you show on the graphs. But the biggest reason why everything came together for