time100 ai red carpet: happyhorse 1.1 beat seedance 2.5, 1.8x cheaper

@TIME magazine's 2026 time100 ai list left off nvidia's jensen huang, amd's lisa su, meta's mark zuckerberg, microsoft's satya nadella and google deepmind's demis hassabis. paris hilton, ben affleck and bernie sanders made the cut instead – hilton under time's "shapers" category. dario amodei, sam altman and elon musk did make the list

so we picked four of them – snubbed and included – and gave them the red-carpet moment ai never did. honestly could pass for the trailer to @Fortnite's next season, ai bosses on the battle pass

the pipeline: gpt-image-2 generated the character portraits, prompts written by opus 5 (medium). those images went through @OpenRouter into two video models run head to head on the same red-carpet scene – bytedance's seedance 2.5 and @alibaba_cloud's happyhorse 1.1 – then cut together

- cost
seedance 2.5 – $13.49, 9 runs
happyhorse 1.1 – $7.51, 12 runs

- time
seedance 2.5 – 62.6m
happyhorse 1.1 – 33.3m

observations:
• seedance costs 1.8x more overall – $1.50/run vs $0.63/run
• seedance also runs slower per attempt – 7.0m a generation against happyhorse's 2.8m
• happyhorse needed 3 more attempts, 33% more tries, and still finished faster

conclusion: happyhorse 1.1 shipped the same scene at 1.8x lower cost and in close to half the time – 33.3m vs 62.6m – despite the extra attempts!

watch the full cut via link: