Creating a video could become as simple as writing an email. Where does that take us?
The Review
Generating high-quality videos could be as easy as writing an email. It's not as far off as we think—industry pundits say this could be reality within the next 18 months. Companies like Runway, Sora, Kling, and the latest player to come out of stealth, Odyssey, are making waves. Odyssey, founded by former self-driving car pioneers, has an exciting twist: they’re creating their own 3D data sets from the physical world and transforming them into 2D, a reverse of the workflow from driverless cars where they would extrapolate a 3D world from two-dimensional points.
Over the next decade, we’re going to see a whole new breed of filmmakers, producers, writers, creating worlds with entirely new infrastructure that might look very different from the media industry we have today. Take DreamFlare, for instance—a new studio and streaming platform where creators team up with professional storytellers and new AI tools to craft unique content. It reminds me a little of literary USG platform Wattpad (home to 97 million creators), but with video instead of text.
We might be witnessing the evolution of the film industry into something much more decentralized, with fewer barriers to entry and more opportunities for brilliant ideas to shine. Less walled gardens and fewer gatekeepers. This means we’ll see an explosion of diverse and innovative content, shaking up the dominance of traditional studios and networks.
It then begets the question: if producing videos becomes as simple as it seems, the real challenge will shift to how we distribute and discover. With so much content, the key will be making sure the best stuff gets noticed. Catching the zeitgeist might feel increasingly elusive in a sea of constant content.
One thing’s for sure: the most valuable companies in the coming decades will be those that are centered around augmenting human creativity. These new tools will open up new pathways to create and collaborate.
Enjoy the update.
The Latest
Microsoft and Apple ditch OpenAI board seats amid regulatory scrutiny: Microsoft has dropped its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI, less than eight months after securing the non-voting seat. Apple was reportedly planning to join OpenAI’s nonprofit board, but now the Financial Times reports that Apple will no longer join the board. OpenAI confirmed that Microsoft has given up its seat in a statement to The Verge, following reports from Axios and the Financial Times that Microsoft’s deputy general counsel Keith Dolliver wrote a letter to OpenAI.
Ex-Googler joins filmmaker to launch DreamFlare, a studio and streaming platform for AI-generated video: A startup called DreamFlare AI is emerging from stealth with the goal of helping content creators make and monetize short-form AI-generated content. The company, co-founded by former Google employee Josh Liss and documentary filmmaker Rob Bralver, is envisioned as a studio where creators work with professional storytellers to create video using third-party AI tools like Runway, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, and others. The videos will then be distributed through a subscription-based online service. Creators will earn money from revenue-sharing on subscriptions and advertising, as well as a few other options.
Ex-Microsoft engineer’s AI video startup scores $60M from top VCs, Jared Leto: Captions, an AI video startup founded by former Microsoft engineer Gaurav Misra, has secured $60 million in Series C funding. Founded in 2021, Captions started as a camera app in which users recorded ‘talking videos’ by engaging with the camera directly. Over the past year, the company has shifted its focus to AI, enabling users to create videos with avatars from scratch.
Groq unveils lightning-fast LLM engine; developer base rockets past 280K in 4 months: Groq has gained attention because it promises it can do AI tasks much faster and more affordably than competitors, which it says is possible due to its language processing unit (LPU) that is much more efficient than GPUs at such tasks. In the Venturebeat video, the LLM running on Groq seems to be able to respond and tweak text almost instantaneously, opening up many more use cases with its lightning-fast inferences.
Stability AI releases new features to Stable Assistant, its user-friendly chatbot: Stable Assistant leverages Stable Image Ultra, its most advanced image generation technology based on Stable Diffusion 3. Stable Assistant provides a variety of image editing tools, as well as upscaling, and using Generative AI to create videos from images. Key features include Search & Replace that gives users the ability to replace an object in an image with another one; and Stable Audio that focuses on instrumentals and enables the production of high-quality, full-length musical tracks
Odyssey emerged from stealth with a ‘Hollywood-grade’ AI video generation platform. The startup is developing four specialized AI video models aimed at revolutionizing visual effects and storytelling capabilities.