nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Hotshot – 4 Person Team Builds a State of the Art Video Model

Hi HN! We're proud to share Hotshot, a large-scale diffusion transformer model for text-to-video generation that we built with just a 4-person team. You can try it today in beta at https://hotshot.co, with 2 free generations per day. The model generates 5 seconds of 720p video from text prompts. It excels at prompt alignment, and consistency. It also excels at generating people, animals, and nature. In blind tests with 100 users, Hotshot generations were preferred to Runway ML 60% of the time. Hotshot generations were preferred to Luma 80% of the time. Overall, users preferred…

Hotshot is a text-to-video generation model that creates 5-second videos in 720p from text prompts. Built by a 4-person team, it uses a diffusion transformer approach trained on 600 million video clips and 1 billion… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Hotshot – 4 Person Team Builds a State of the Art Video Model launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Deepshot▲291

    AI reshoots and lip generation at your finger tips

    2023 · deepshot.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    AI lip syncing & generation with no limits

    2024 · deepshot.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    A large language model for zero-shot video generation

    2023 · sites.research.google · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hello HN! I want to share something me and a few friends have been working on for a while now — Zeroshot, a web tool that builds image classifiers using text-image models and autolabeling. What does this mean in practice? You can put together an image classifier in about 30 seconds that’s faster and more accurate than CLIP, but that you can deploy yourself however you’d like. It’s open source, commercially licensed, and doesn’t require you to pay anyone per API call. Here's a 2 minute video that shows it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4R1gtmM-Lo How/why does it…

    2023 · usezeroshot.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5LS

    Hey HN, this is Lina, Andrew, and Sidney from Lemon Slice. We’ve trained a custom diffusion transformer (DiT) model that achieves video streaming at 25fps and wrapped it into a demo that allows anyone to turn a photo into a real-time, talking avatar. Here’s an example conversation from co-founder Andrew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeYp5xQMFZY. Try it for yourself at: https://lemonslice.com/live. (Btw, we used to be called Infinity AI and did a Show HN under that name last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467704.) Unlike existing…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Writeup (includes good/bad sample generations): https://www.linum.ai/field-notes/launch-linum-v2 We're Sahil and Manu, two brothers who spent the last 2 years training text-to-video models from scratch. Today we're releasing them under Apache 2.0. These are 2B param models capable of generating 2-5 seconds of footage at either 360p or 720p. In terms of model size, the closest comparison is Alibaba's Wan 2.1 1.3B. From our testing, we get significantly better motion capture and aesthetics. We're not claiming to have reached the frontier. For us, this is a stepping…

    Jan 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Text-to-video AI generator

    2024 · hotshot.co · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    V2Fun▲449

    Generate 3D character with 8K textures and AI motion capture

    Jul 2026 · v2fun.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A few months ago, I started making video clips with stable diffusion and noticed that the tools to do this were too complicated for everyday people. That's why I built neural frames. Enjoy.

    2023 · neuralframes.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hello HN! I would like to show our recent research project: DynamiCrafter. DynamiCrafter can animate open-domain still images based on text prompt by leveraging the pre-trained video diffusion priors. It supports: - Image-to-video generation - Storytelling video generation - Looping video generation - Generative frame interpolation We have released source code at https://github.com/Doubiiu/DynamiCrafter and deployed a demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Doubiiu/DynamiCrafter Please also refer to…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN I’ve been experimenting with different image generation tools for months — but I kept running into the same problems: slow generation, repeated outputs, and limited artistic control. That’s why I built MAI-Image-1, Microsoft’s latest AI image generation model designed for creators, designers, and developers who need fast, realistic results without sacrificing flexibility. What makes MAI-Image-1 different: Ultra-realistic rendering — it accurately captures light, texture, and natural shadows. Lightning-fast generation — create detailed images in seconds. No style lock-in — experiment…

    Jun 2026 · microsoft.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    LTX.bio▲164

    Hey HN, after our 13B release we've been working on a faster version of our open-source video model and we're excited to share it. We started with a 13B base model that already had competitive generation speeds (e.g. 55s for a 5s video on an H100 — faster than any other model out there). But we wanted to push it further to allow everyone to quickly iterate over their video generations. So we built a distilled version focused on speed without sacrificing temporal or spatial coherence. With the Distilled model, you can now generate 5-second 720p videos in about 9.5 seconds on an H100, and…

    2021 · lightricks.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    It's our new text-to-image model: a 9.3B single-stream diffusion transformer trained entirely from scratch. We focused heavily on controllability through structured JSON prompts, with strong text rendering, spatial awareness through bounding box guidance, and color palette control. It has the best text rendering of any open-weight model we've tested so far, and the NF4 quantized checkpoint runs on a single 24GB GPU. For more technical details and examples see our blog post: https://ideogram.ai/blog/ideogram-4.0/ We will be happy to answer any questions :)

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Create social videos 10x faster with AI

    2025 · veed.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I previously posted this a month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876742 I have rewritten it to be much more simple, from 951 lines of code to just 364, with no loss in core functionality or generation quality. I also added a tiny GPT implementation as a comparison (inspired by Andrej Karpathy's code). The two model implementations are ~80% identical, with the core differences being the generate and get_batch functions. The model architecture, training loop, etc, differ in only 19 lines of code. Trained weights are included, so you can just clone and run…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Generate AI Videos using the latest models in Telegram

    2025 · its alternatives →

  17. 17TY

    I've had a blast playing with stable diffusion and I see all the potential it will bring to us. I released a service for training your model, just upload 20-30 images and you can have a model of someone or some object doing anything. You can train one model for free a month in a slower queue or you can train many models on a fast queue and with other features for a fee. Here is an example of using it for show product placement: https://app.88stacks.com/image/O6kReClOvrz7 and here is an example of using it for people:…

    2022 · 88stacks.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    The model has 3B active parameters. We put the code, homepage, paper and model links here: - Code: https://github.com/bytedance/Lance - Homepage: https://lance-project.github.io/ - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18678 - Model: https://huggingface.co/bytedance-research/Lance p.s. Lance is a research project, not a polished product. The model was trained using fewer than 128 GPUs.

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN — I’m an indie maker building Seedance AI. It helps people create short videos (and images) from text prompts and reference photos. I tried to keep it simple: fast templates, predictable credit pricing, and downloadable results. It’s still early, and I know there are rough edges. I’d really appreciate honest feedback on what feels useful, what feels confusing, and what I should improve first. Happy to answer technical or product questions.

    2025 · seedance.tv · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Two-Stage Diffusion for Fast, High-Res Video

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21ND
  22. 22

    Turn Photo into an Eye-Catching Video in One Click

    2025 · popvid.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Create Video from Image Online with Stable Video Diffusion

    2023 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hello HN! We have released a major update of our image-to-video diffusion model, DynamiCrafter, with better dynamic, higher resolution, and stronger coherence. DynamiCrafter can animate open-domain still images based on text prompt by leveraging the pre-trained video diffusion priors. Please check our project page and paper for more information. We will continue to improve the model's performance. Comparisons with Stable Video Diffusion and PikaLabs can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NfmIsNAg-g Online demo:…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →