😺 AI Videos: Cool But Clunky

Welcome, humans.

#ThrowbackThursday: It's been six years and two days since GPT-1 hit the scene. Back then, it trained for 30 days on 8 P600 GPUs and 7,000 unpublished books.

Feels like a lifetime ago, right? Just a reminder, 2018 brought us the Tide Pod Challenge, the Baby Shark song, and the "Is this a pigeon” meme. Ah, simpler times!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Two new Sora competitors popped up this week.
• OpenAI teamed up with Oracle for cloud support.
• OpenAI’s annualized revenue 2x’d in the last 6 months to $3.4M.
• Stable Diffusion 3 Medium is now out.

AI video generation tools are cool but not usable.

It’s been a minute since we talked about AI video tools. You know, the kind where you describe a movie scene, and AI produces something that looks like a fever dream.

Currently, Sora is leading the pack in text-to-video, but since its launch in February, we’ve only seen a few cool demos. Four months of trailers?! OpenAI must think it's Hollywood…

Last month, Google showcased its own video model, Veo, capable of making clips up to 60 seconds. But like Sora, it’s not available to the public.

This week, two more AI video generators surfaced.

The 1st is Kling, a Chinese competitor to Sora. It’s also on a waitlist and only available in China. So unless you're our one subscriber in China (yes, true story), you won’t be able to try it.

The video quality of Kling is a step up from Runway, but still a notch below Sora, as seen in their respective Balloon Man videos:

The 2nd is Dream Machine from Luma AI. Dream Machine is trained directly on videos (they didn’t say which ones) and can generate 5-second clips from text and/or images. From its demos, it looks similar to Sora’s quality, though shorter.

This time, you can actually try it for free on their website—generate up to 30 videos for free, though it might take a while due to high demand.

Why it matters: This tech is super impressive and fun—it lets everyone feel like a kid again. But it’s far from ready for legit commercial use.

Don’t buy into those “HOLLYWOOD IS DEAD” threads on X. Until AI video generators fix their hallucinations, wonky physics, 3D rendering, and other issues, these tools will likely be used more for play than professional production.

That’s not to say AI won’t impact film production—Hollywood is already using generative AI in the production pipeline for graphics, visual effects, dubbing, deepfakes, and postproduction.

Related watching: Check out the winners of Runway’s 2nd annual Film Festival, where artists used AI to help create short films and win over $60K in prizes!

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Around the Horn.

• OpenAI and Microsoft joined forces with Oracle to run Azure AI on its cloud.
• OpenAI’s annualized revenue more than doubled in the last six months to $3.4B—$200M of that comes from a cut of Microsoft’s sales.
• Apple took the crown from Microsoft, becoming the world’s most valuable company after unveiling Apple Intelligence.
• Some US-based startups like Opus Clip and HeyGen are trying to relocate engineers who live in China amid geopolitical tensions.

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Thursday Trivia.

Yesterday, Stability AI launched its latest AI image generator, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium. Strange name, but hey, you can try it here or download the code on HuggingFace.

One glance, everyone knows the rules: one image is shot from Luma, and the other is real.

Which is which?

A.

B.

A Cat's Commentary.