The Creator of Redis Made a Chinese Video Model Run on a Mac. Europeans Are Not Licensed to Use It
Salvatore Sanfilippo published h3.c, a C and Metal engine that runs MiniMax H3 natively on Apple Silicon. The model's own licence excludes the EU, UK, US and South Korea from local deployment.
Salvatore Sanfilippo, better known as antirez and as the man who wrote Redis, published something called h3.c this week: an engine that runs MiniMax H3, a 33 billion parameter video generation model, natively on Apple Silicon in C and Metal, under an MIT licence. It landed on the front page of Hacker News with over 400 points. MiniMax itself reacted with a line that captures why open weights matter: you cannot hire this, you can only open source and let it happen.
H3 is a genuinely strong model. It takes text, images, video and audio as one combined input and produces clips of four to fifteen seconds with native stereo audio synced to the picture, rather than a soundtrack glued on afterwards. It ranks first for video editing with audio on Artificial Analysis and in the top three for text-to-video and image-to-video. Weights went up on Hugging Face on August 3.
Sanfilippo’s contribution is a port, and ports are how open models actually reach people. MiniMax’s official recipe wants four GPUs. Community setups with quantisation, which shrinks the numbers inside a model so it needs less memory, plus offloading get the floor down to roughly 12 GB of video memory and 64 GB of system RAM. His engine goes further and targets the hardware sitting on a lot of desks.
What is behind it
Here is the part that matters if you are reading this from Germany, Austria or Switzerland. MiniMax’s H3 Community Licence defines an “Applicable Territory” that explicitly excludes the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Korea. Running the open weights locally, modifying them or distributing the output is not licensed in those four regions. MiniMax’s hosted API stays globally available. It is specifically the local, open-weights path that is geofenced.
Other terms in the same licence: products built on H3 must display “MiniMax H3” prominently, companies above 20 million dollars in yearly revenue need separate written authorisation, and training a smaller model on H3’s output is not permitted. This pattern, a strong open release paired with a licence that carves out the largest Western markets, is becoming recognisable among Chinese labs. Worth remembering that “open weights” is a description of the files, not a promise about your rights.
What this means for you: Read the licence before the benchmark. For a European hobbyist, h3.c is a fascinating piece of engineering that you are not licensed to run on your own machine, and MiniMax’s hosted API is the compliant route. For anyone evaluating open models for work, treat the licence as the first check rather than the last: territory, revenue ceiling and attribution clauses can rule a model out long before hardware does.
Sources
Source: https://github.com/antirez/h3.c
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