Open Weights: What You Get and What Stays Hosted
- →State precisely which H3 components are open weights and which remain hosted-only
- →Summarize the license situation — including the Excluded Territories and the API-versus-weights split — and why open source needs qualification in front of a legal team
- →Decide between self-hosting H3-Base and paying per second, using the real price list
On 2026-08-03 MiniMax published the announcement "Open General Intelligence: MiniMax H3 Is Now Open Source" and pushed weights to Hugging Face under the official org: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3. The repo carries H3-Base — a 33-billion-parameter dense architecture MiniMax calls the H3-Omni-Transformer — shipped in BF16 as two checkpoints, FL2VA and Ref2VA, plus the two official prompt-writing guides: the base guide covering the T2VA/I2VA/FL2VA/L2VA modes, and the reference guide covering reference mode.
Those guides deserve special mention. They are the source of the entire prompt grammar from h3-c2 — the natural-language camera vocabulary, the [Shot N] structure, the <d>[LanguageTag]</d> dialogue tags. Even if you never load a checkpoint, the repo's docs folder alone justifies the visit.
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