Nanjing University Open-Sources VideoChat3 Video Model

Nanjing University's Multimedia Computing Group released VideoChat3, an open video AI model with full training weights and recipe, on July 17.

Open video models have lagged behind open text for years. Full releases, weights plus the actual training recipe, are rare. VideoChat3 picked up 124 upvotes on Hugging Face within two days, a strong showing for an open-video release specifically. Teams needing video understanding usually rent it through an API instead of running their own model.

VideoChat3 targets general video understanding rather than a narrow captioning or QA task bolted onto a base model. That's the real distinction: a lot of open video work ships as a single-purpose head, not something meant to generalize across tasks.

Full weights and a recipe put VideoChat3 on the short list of open video models that can replace, not just benchmark, a paid API. Whether a team ships a production feature on top of it in the weeks ahead is the thing to watch.