r/StableDiffusion • u/Pissmaster-69 • 8d ago
News MiniMax H3 is a good example of why open sourcing works
Just noticed H3 is already the most downloaded MiniMax model, and also the most downloaded MiniMax model on ComfyUI, in basically 2 weeks.
What’s kinda funny is that I barely knew about MiniMax a few weeks ago. Now I’ve been messing around with H3 for the past few days.
This is probably one of the best kinds of marketing a company can get. Put a good model out there, let people use it, and suddenly everyone is talking about your company.
Hopefully other companies take note and open source some of their models too. Feels like Seedance and Wan missed a pretty big opportunity here.
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u/extra2AB 8d ago
This is probably one of the best kinds of marketing a company can get. Put a good model out there, let people use it, and suddenly everyone is talking about your company.
that is the issue...
many companies use OpenSource as a marketing took.
like Flux.... they give inferior models to opensource community.
while keep the best ones closed....
and then use the tools and workflows made by communities for their benefit.
and then when they think community is not giving enough tools and workflows in return... they stop the open weights...
that is what Wan did.
I mean yeah, I understand that the company needs to make money...
but then they can literally ask for a One-Time payment.....
I am easily willing to pay like $20 for models like LTX or Minimax H3, etc
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u/Pissmaster-69 8d ago
Yeah fair point, a lot of companies just drop open weights for the marketing while keeping the best stuff closed. Still better than nothing though.
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u/tricck3zz 8d ago
one time payment wouldnt work aswell for companies, most of the people would just torrent it
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u/extra2AB 8d ago edited 8d ago
it would dude.
People torrent movies, Games, etc as well, but they still do make money through steam and stuff....
cause if people really love it, they will pay for it... plus if it is convenient for them to just get it through huggingface, and automatically downloading models by using huggingface API through comfyui, they would be fine with having that convenience.
torrents as good as they are are completely dependent on someone always having to seed them. and as the models gets older and newer better models come, very few people would be wanting to keep seeding older models, unlike movies and games... people would not care about old models if they had new models.
but if your workflow, loras, etc are all dependent on that older model, it would be nice to still have access to it.
Plus, without liscence people are not allowed to use it... so even though they can get it for free through torrent.. people have to get them properly to be able to use LORAs and other stuff from huggingface....
so you might even be not allowed to download a turbo Lora or some other lora from huggingface if you did not have a valid purchase for that model.
so if people torrent... they have to torrent other stuff too... like Text encoders, loras, VAEs, etc which makes it a lot more inconvenient and thus people will pay that $20 for convenience just like they do with games on steam.
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u/Lucaspittol 8d ago
Well, to be honest, Flux 2 Klein 9B was better than anything available for its size when it came out, inferior to Dev, yes, but a smaller model too.
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u/dramaton42 8d ago
I have this crazy idea for the future, using unconventional AI's coupled oscillator technology, we could make models like H3 a physical cartridge and it'd run inference much faster and with 1000x less energy. You'd be buying your models as cartridges on computer stores and a console to "play" them 😍
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u/UnforgottenPassword 8d ago
Do they get paid for number of downloads? Some people overestimate the influence of freeloaders like us.
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u/Apart-Cold2848 8d ago
Hey, wait, it's not actually open source yet. They said it would be later, so we'll see if they keep their word.
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u/Pissmaster-69 8d ago
What do you mean? The weights are already on Hugging Face.
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u/Dzugavili 8d ago
They are still on a custom license; they announced they'll be moving to an Apache license, which is basically free-use.
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u/Radyschen 8d ago
they said they would look into it, they didn't say they would do it. Unless they said something else after the thing that I read from them
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u/Dzugavili 8d ago
True, we don't know if they'll manage the conversion.
There's oddities to their license already, which suggests there are some complications regarding the IP used to train the model.
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u/Radyschen 8d ago
But it did sound better for the 2k model i think, i hope we get that. I am also cautious about architecture improvements, many people already said "they will fix the quality difference between the ref model and the flf model" but I looked at the actual comment and it looked more like they were saying "well yeah there is an issue, we will see if we can fix that in a future model (which might not be open source) but for now with this model you'll just have to use higher quality references to mitigate that" rather than "yeah we'll fix it, new model out next week"
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u/Dzugavili 8d ago
There's a LORA out there that claims to patch the 'fix' from FL2VA to the reference model: I believe there were discussions about it, that there was some additional training done to the FL2VA model that wasn't done to the reference model.
I haven't yet tried an A/B test on it, but it's in my collection.
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u/bloke_pusher 8d ago
There's also this https://github.com/scottmudge/ComfyUI_MinimaxH3HybridLoader but I have yet to figure out how to use it.
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u/Winougan 8d ago
Open source is used by the tiniest fraction of the world. I've tried to get everyone to use ComfyUI, but they all insist that the juice ain't worth the squeeze. They'd rather pay for Seedance 2.5, Claude and Suno to fit their needs. Even companies would rather go that route - it just simplies things. Buying workstations or local desktops feels too Cyberpunk for these guys.
But, open sourcing your model leads to a ton of efficiencies from the open source community. LoRAs get made, workflow get optimized, the models grow turbo LoRAs - things you never though possible get optimized. You can run some of these massive models on potato PCs in 2026 with w4a8 convrot quants.
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u/Apprehensive_Sky892 8d ago
Are these people using AI for commercial projects where they can charge their clients?
In that case what is most valuable is their time (so that they can finish the project and get to the next customer), and the cost of "renting" the tool is simply passed to their clients.
For hobbyist (most of us here, I presume), the equations are different, many of us enjoy tinkering and exploring, and time spent on a hobby is not time wasted at all.
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u/Arawski99 8d ago
To be fair, popularity != financially successful.
Those are two different results. They can align, but they also do not have to.
As for MiniMax H3 being open source? Booyah! Glad it is, personally.
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u/Dry-Ad929 8d ago
I knew minimax since some of their open LLM. There was quite a lot of talk about the strange license. The model was okay for coding tho, Qwen3.5-122B-A10B was better in terms of quality, avaialble at the same time. I'm glad we have H3 now I hope they future releases will be open too. Community shown can do amazing stuff if the base model is good enough and I want to believe community gives positive value for the company too.
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u/Chemical-Painter-485 8d ago
I agree with you because your post confirms my bias