Check out the world's first music video made entirely with Sora.

Happy Friday! Here’s the latest from the world of AI and creativity.

1. Text-to-video heats up.

Behold the world’s first music video made entirely with Sora, made for indie artist Washed Out’s latest release, “The Hardest Part”. The four minute video, directed by Paul Trillo, takes the viewer though key moments in a couples’ lives from making out in a high school in the 80s to becoming parents. This week, Chinese researchers released Vidu, a challenger to OpenAI’s Sora which can generate 16-second 1080P videos from text prompts. 

2. Voice AI goes conversational.

ElevenLabs introduces Chris, a new feature that allows users to add a voice with a casual, conversational tone for their next film, commercial, or audiobook. Google adds AI conversation practice for English language learners, by letting people speak into their phones and practice English with a conversational AI bot. 

3. Stability adds sketch to image to its API

StabilityAI adds two new features to its API – Sketch and Structure: Sketch upgrades rough hand-drawn sketches to refined outputs with precise control, and Structure generates images by maintaining the structure of an input image. 

4. Musk closes in on $6B for its chatbot Grok.

Musk’s xAI is close to raising $6 billion from Sequoia, others: As reported by The Information, xAI is close to securing $6B in funding, valuing Elon Musk's year-old AI startup at $18B. Notably, on a recent X space, Elon said they'd need 100,000 NVIDIA H100s to train Grok 3.0 (they currently have roughly 20,000).