He Only Said It Wasn't Qwen 4, and the Comments Had Already Bet on a Fifth Name

On the evening of November 2, Ivan Fioravanti said he had gotten early access to a model that will be released this week.

The accompanying video is a voxel-style holiday scene. The thumbnail says MIDNIGHT OVER ST. NIKLAUS, with CHRISTMAS EVE IN CUBES OF LIGHT on the line below. The blocks build a night scene, with light applied layer by layer.

He added three sentences: it's not Qwen 4; it looks pretty strong; he's still testing, so send over any prompts you want to try.

Those three sentences lit up the comments.

Scroll down and it's basically a betting pool. Some guessed DeepSeek 4.1 Pro, some guessed a Pro version of MiniMax, some said it seemed like a larger Ornith, and others proposed a combination of OpenAI distilling DeepSeek. People also asked about open-source weights and model size.

Ivan replied to one of them: DeepSeek doesn't play that game; they just release their models straight away, and there's no such thing as early access. In another reply, he gave a timeline: the release is just a few days away.

At least two answers are ruled out.

More valuable than guessing the name are the two prompts in the comments.

The first came from JayPowell. He asked for a Burj Al Arab scene: a single HTML file, Three.js loaded from a CDN, Minecraft-style voxel rendering, 60fps, and it had to look like a short film, not a tech demo.

A whole set of style constraints followed. Everything could only use axis-aligned blocks; no spheres, cylinders, curved surfaces, or textures; curves had to be built up layer by layer from voxel silhouettes, even the sail edges had to be stepped; the palette was fixed to the Persian Gulf from dusk to nightfall: turquoise sea, warm sand, sail white, steel gray, and palm green.

The main subject listed seven items: the sail, the mast spire at the rear, the X-shaped steel framework on the sides, the cantilevered helipad (with an H marking and edge lights), the sky bar, the circular artificial-island base, and the curved bridge connecting back to the shore. Three systems ran in loops: a 64-second day/night cycle; the sail-wall lights turning on cell by cell from bottom to top and slowly changing color; and a voxel helicopter circling, landing, and taking off again, with no clipping throughout.

Further down were double-layer sine waves on the water, a beach and 40 palm trees, the wavy hotel next door, small cars running on the bridge, three wooden sailboats and a white yacht trailing a wake, the Dubai skyline with the Burj Khalifa in the distance, 8 seagulls, and 3 clouds. Four camera angles switched every 8 seconds, with a 1-second smooth transition.

The key to this prompt is that it broke 'decent-looking' down into acceptance-testable numbers. Voxel count was capped at 80,000, draw calls at 80, shadow maps at 1024, and tone-mapping exposure was hard-coded to 1.1. A wish became a tender document.

The second prompt was much shorter. Liu Chao suggested testing a mobile settings page: five controls, clear labels, no subheadings or explanatory filler, each setting had to persist after refresh, and then check the rendered result and persistence.

The direction is completely different from the render. A beautiful voxel animation can show that a model can put visuals together; holding to twenty lines of constraints, preserving state, and getting labels right is what shows it's actually usable.

Ivan said he was running more complex tests and promised to compare DeepSeek's version on the same task; when the results come out, he'll @ the author of that prompt.

No one knows what the model is called yet, and the betting list has already reached a fifth name.

If you want to prove someone wrong, place your bet now.