Meta unveils advanced video-creation AI
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Still image from "Surfing Koala," a video created by Meta's Movie Gen AI. Screenshot: Meta
Meta on Friday announced Movie Gen, a state-of-the-art generative AI video model that can create longer, more customizable videos than rival tools, a top Meta AI executive told Axios.
Why it matters: Video-creation models have emerged as a major focus for a number of tech giants, including Meta, OpenAI and Adobe — but Movie Gen, like many rival products, is a ways off from general public availability.
Driving the news: Meta unveiled Movie Gen and detailed its capabilities in a 90-page research paper.
- The company says it can create 16-second video snippets from a single prompt, and can also make them personalized using just a single photo.
- Meta says Movie Gen also allows for more precise editing than other models, including the ability to replace one object with another inside a video. In one example, a lantern is converted to a bubble, while another sample replaced a Quest-style VR headset with steampunk goggles.
What they're saying: "This is the most advanced video generation system that we know of," Ahmad Al-Dahle, vice president of generative AI at Meta, told Axios.
The big picture: Video creation is one of the widely eyed uses for generative AI, for everything from entertainment to corporate messaging. Startups like Runway have focused on the creative end, with HeyGen and others focused on enterprise use cases.
- This week, Adobe allowed a handful of creators to post content made with its forthcoming Firefly Video Engine. Adobe has said it plans to release the tool this year.
- Pika also demonstrated some powerful capabilities in its latest release, such as the ability to transform objects into squishable versions of themselves.
Yes, but: Many of the tools, including OpenAI's Sora, are not yet available. OpenAI officials earlier this week declined to offer an update on when it might be made available more broadly.
Between the lines: Broadly releasing video tools like these raises safety concerns, and providing these services at scale requires a vast amount of processing power.
- Al-Dahle did not provide a specific time frame for turning Movie Gen into a consumer product, but he said it won't be this year.
- "We're very much on the productization path," he said. "We're also working with filmmakers and creators to test the model and get feedback."
- As with others in this space, Meta was vague about what data was used to train Movie Gen, noting only it was a mix of licensed and "publicly available" content.
