MiniMax officially open-sources the H3 raw image model, producing 16.8 million pixels in 6 steps
MiniMax officially released H3-Image and open-sourced the model weights. This model can directly generate images of 4096×4096, approximately 16.8 million pixels, without additional upscaling. According to official data, the generation time is less than 10 seconds, with speeds reaching up to 5 times that of mainstream products. Text-to-image and image editing have been integrated into the same model, supporting up to 16 reference images.
H3-Image follows the architecture of the H3 video model, removing the audio component while retaining the original text encoder and redesigning the decoder for images. The core image generation network has 33.1 billion parameters, requiring only 6 sampling steps to generate an image. On August 7, MiniMax researcher Kiro revealed in a Reddit AMA that the team is developing a dedicated image model based on the H3 homogenous architecture and plans to open-source the weights. They also proposed a workflow where the image model generates the first frame, which is then handed over to H3 for video generation.
On November 3, Pruna AI launched P-H3-Image based on the open-source H3 video model, supporting raw images and retouching, compressing the generation network from 33.1 billion to approximately 20 billion parameters, requiring only 8 sampling steps. The minimal quantization version is about 20 GB, with peak memory usage of approximately 21 GB when generating 8 million pixel images. The official MiniMax version retains the 33.1 billion parameter generation network, with a sampling step count of 6, and supports higher resolutions and more reference images, with the original weights plus the reused text encoder totaling approximately 135 GB. There are regional restrictions on the open-source license; the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and South Korea are not within the community license authorization regions. Companies with annual revenues exceeding 1 million dollars or those providing model hosting services to third parties must obtain separate authorization in advance.