10 ms·

Generate videos in Gemini and Whisk with Veo 2

347 points by meetpateltech 2y ago

transformi 2y ago
[flagged]
delichon 2y ago
I think I would buy "yes" shares in a Polymarket event that predicts a motion picture created by a single person grossing more than $100M by 2027.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  I think the obstacles there are distribution and IP rights. I think we will see content like that find widespread appeal and success but actually turning it into $100m in revenue requires having the copyright (at present, not possible for AI-generated content) and being able to convince a distributor to invest in it. Those both seem like really tough things to solve.
  - delichon 2y ago
    Purely AI-generated content -- with no human authorship -- is not eligible for US copyright protection. However if a human contributes meaningfully to the final output (editing, selection, arrangement, etc.) it becomes eligible. See Thaler v. Perlmutter (2023).
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      >is not eligible for US copyright protection Once industry adopts AI generation, which it will, a new law will be quickly signed. In a way, not allowing copyright of AI material really only serves a tiny group of people. "We want to empower everyone to bring their ideas to market, not just those with the ability to draw them" is not a particularly evil or amoral sentiment.
      - gh0stcat 2y ago
        As if the ability is not attainable, people want to be put on top of the mountain without any effort.
        Workaccount2 2y ago
        When society climbs mountains, they eventually build elevators. Its a core functionality and the reason why we are so advanced. Just take a moment to realize how many peaks you already sit on top of, without even thinking about. Your home is overflowing with cheap wares from mountains ascended ages ago that you now have "no effort" access to.
  - r58lf 2y ago
    Yeah, people underestimate how hard it is to get a movie into a theatre AND get people to pay for a ticket. Hollywood can barely get any well made movies past $100 million these days unless it's based on some well known franchise (minecraft, Captain America, Snow White) or it has some well known actor.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  I think you might need qualifiers on that. Are we talking an unknown / unrelated person living in the proverbial basement, or are we talking a famous movie director? I could see Spielberg or Cameron managing to make something like that happen on their name + AI alone. If we're talking regular people, the best chance would be someone like Andy Weir, blogging their way to a successful book, and working on the side on a video project. I wouldn't be surprised if something along these lines happens sooner or later.
- xnx 2y ago
  We've got a pretty good datapoint along that trajectory with Flow. Almost entirely one person and has grossed $36 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
  - jsheard 2y ago
    It was a small team for sure but not a one man show, there are 22 credits for the animation work alone, plus 13 more for sound and music, not counting the director.
    - xnx 2y ago
      > Almost entirely one person It is closer to one than number the staff of other animated films. It's a good data point to keep in mind as AI tools enable even smaller teams to do more.
  - karolist 2y ago
    Went to the cinema with my kids for the 2nd time to watch this one, was pleasantly surprised to read this movie was done using Blender, highly recommended.
  - mattfrommars 2y ago
    One person? What do you mean? It literally says in the wiki more than one. This isn't solo dev game project.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- silksowed 2y ago
  very excited to play around. will be attempting to see if i can get character coherence between runs. the issue with the 8s limit is its hard to stitch them together if characters are not consistent. good for short form distribution but not youtube mini series or eventual movies. another comment about IP license is indeed an issue but its why i am looking towards classical works beyond their copyright dates. my goal is to eventually work from short form, to youtube to eventual short films. tools are limited in their current form but the future is promising if i get started now.
- jddj 2y ago
  I came to the same sort of conclusion when watching Kitsune, which I think was one person and VEO https://vimeo.com/1047370252 https://vimeo.com/1047370252 Granted, 5 minutes isn't 1h30 but it's not a million miles away either.
  - xrd 2y ago
    It's fantastic. I just watched Kitsune, thanks for sharing. It reminds me why Flow was so good. Flow was great because I could see the shader artifacts. It was the opposite of a Disney model, it was not polished and perfect. That's why I loved it. Disney would never do a movie with a plot like Flow. They would write and rewrite it and it would be a perfect example of humanity, but totally devoid of the humanity behind it. It is ironic that this new coming wave of AI generated (or AI assisted) films feel like they have more human craftmanship than Disney films, when honestly it is the opposite. Disney has incredible and brilliant animators, but that is all crushed behind the merchandising and gross behemoth of the Disney corporation. I used to love seeing independent films. Those art house theaters really only exist in places like Portland, OR these days. But, I'm excited about the next wave of film because it'll permit small storytelling, and that's going to be great.
  - gh0stcat 2y ago
    This actually so amateurish and cliche it's painful. The fact people like this shows that art never had a chance when the masses have no taste. This makes me depressed for artists and the future.
    - jddj 2y ago
      It won't be novel the 100th or 1000th or millionth time, and standards will rise accordingly. But for now it is, or at least 2 months ago it was. Someone created that relatively coherent 5min animated story largely by communicating with a computer in natural language. The masses have had plenty worse
    - switchbak 2y ago
      Well sure, but we're in the early stages here smashing bones together. When a few million bored teenagers bang at this, I bet you'll see perspectives you've never thought of. It'd be like having someone in the 1920's listen to Nirvana - just a completely different experience. Given the dreck coming out of Hollywood, I'm open to that, even if other folks have to wade through a million shitty videos for me to get it.
- tracerbulletx 2y ago
  Everyone keeps ignoring supply and demand when talking about the impacts of AI. Let's just assume it really gets so good you can do this and it doesn't suck. Yes the costs will get so low that there will be almost no barrier to making content but if there is no barrier to making content, the ROI will be massive, and so everyone will be doing it, you can more or less have the exact movie you want in your head on demand, and even if you want a bespoke movie from an artist with great taste and a point of view there will be 10,000 of them every year.
  - GloamingNiblets 2y ago
    A good parallel is writing books. Books can cost little to write and publish, but their success is Pareto distributed, not Normally distributed.
    - mlboss 2y ago
      Writing book is really expensive. You have to think and put words on paper that engages the read. It is really hard.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    Most of us have no idea what movies we want. The most delightful films are a total surprise (other than the drones who watch every Marvel film of course).
  - nmilo 2y ago
    It will be like YouTube. Distribution will be hard and most of it will be slop but every now and then you’ll discover something so good and so creative and it couldn’t have possibly existed before that it makes the whole experience worth it. The best creative works are led by one person and I’m excited to see what people can come up with.
  - yorwba 2y ago
    And one of those 10,000 will have a multimillion marketing budget and people are talking about it online and remixing it into memes and it will make a lot more money than the second-most popular movie, even though there's no discernable quality difference.
- colesantiago 2y ago
  My prediction is on track to this and this was made only 4 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951
  - delichon 2y ago
    There may be a solo (not Han) movie good enough to compete in five years, but I doubt that Academy voters will be that welcoming of the tech that can obliterate most of their jobs by then.
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
      Based on the training data being pop culture, we may even get a good Han Solo movie from tools like this. Starring young Ford.
    - switchbak 2y ago
      If AI can fix the terrible ending that was Game of Thrones, then perhaps it won't have been a complete waste after all.
      - anshumankmr 2y ago
        What ending for Game of Thrones? Wasn't it cancelled after Season 6?
- SirMaster 2y ago
  Well text generation is way ahead of video generation. Have we seen anyone create something like a best selling or high grossing novel with an LLM yet?
  - delichon 2y ago
    That's why going from one person to zero persons will be so hard. But one Kubrick/Carmack and a bunch of AI could make a compelling movie now.
- bookofjoe 2y ago
  Me too. Sam Altman recently predicted that we will see a one-person unicorn company in the near future.
- hammock 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) $36 million dollars and an Academy Award. A l m o s t done by just one person. And entirely with open source software. The guy's previous movie was a true one-man show but didn't really get screenings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(2019_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(2019_film)
  - farzd 2y ago
    `The movie "Flow" cost approximately $3.7 million to $4 million to produce` - big budget for almost one person.
  - machomaster 2y ago
    Not true. Dozens of people participated in creating this movie.
- baxtr 2y ago
  I can’t exactly say why, but I find this "single person $1B company" meme utterly annoying.
- tclancy 2y ago
  But will it cost less than $100M to render?
xnx 2y ago
This is amazing. I wouldn't think that something as computationally expensive as generating 8 second videos would be available outside of paid API anytime soon.
Shadow360 2y ago
[flagged]
minimaxir 2y ago
Whisk itself (https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk) was released a few months ago under the radar as a demo for Imagen 3 and it's actually fun to play with and surprisingly robust given its particular implementation. It uses a prompt transmutation trick (convert the uploaded images into a textual description; can verify by viewing the description of the uploaded image) and the strength of Imagen 3's actually modern text encoder to be able to adhere to those long transmuted descriptions for Subject/Scene/Style.
- torginus 2y ago
  Why text? why not encode the image into some latent space representation, so that it can survive a round-trip more or less faithfully?
  - minimaxir 2y ago
    Because Imagen 3 is a text-to-image model, not an image-to-image model, so the inputs have to be some form of text. Multimodal models such as 4o image generation or Gemini 2.0 which can take in both text and image inputs do encode image inputs to a latent space through a Vision Transformer, but not reverseable or losslessly.
    - waffletower 2y ago
      Typically generative models, particularly diffusion models like Imagen 3, are easily architected to support several vectors toward the latent space of the model. It is not open source so there might be an architectural reason I cannot see, but I don't think the public interface to the model should suggest its capabilities -- it is uncommon for image to image not to be supported in open source image generation models, for example. However, there are definite legal reasons not to provide such a vector in a public facing model like Imagen 3.
    - waffletower 2y ago
      And Gemini gave the Yes-man treatment to my statement here :D "In summary: Your assessment aligns well with the technical realities of diffusion models and the practical, legal, and safety considerations large companies face when deploying powerful generative AI tools publicly. It's entirely feasible that Imagen 3's underlying architecture could support image inputs, but Google has chosen not to expose this capability publicly due to the associated risks and complexities."
smallnix 2y ago
Brave to make ads with the Ghibli style. Would have thought that's burned by now.
- minimaxir 2y ago
  Looking at the video, I think there's shenanigans afoot. The anime picture they input as a sample image is more generic anime, but the example output image is clearly Ghibli-esque in the same vein as the 4o image generations.
- gh0stcat 2y ago
  No one has any morals or soul at this point. It's all garbage in, garbage out.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Do you know the name of the artist at Studio Ghibli you're defending? (It isn't "Hayao Miyazaki".)
byearthithatius 2y ago
Very impressive release compared to what was possible even a single year ago. It feels like we are in a great state right now with respect to ML where all the big companies are competing and pushing each other to make the tech better. This is rare nowadays in America (or in general).
strangattractor 2y ago
Google is the new Microsoft in the sense that they can Embrace, extend, and extinguish their competition. No matter what xAI or OpenAI or "anything"AI tries to build Google will eventually copy and destroy them at scale. AI (or A1 as our Secretary of Education calls it) is interesting because it is more difficult to protect the IP other than as trade secrets.
- mritun 2y ago
  > Google will eventually copy… Weird take given Google basically invented and released through well written papers and open-source software the modern deep learning stack which all others build on. Google was being disses because they failed to make any product and were increasingly looking like Kodak/Xerox one trick pony. It seems they have woken up from whatever slumber they were in
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    They didn't entirely drop the ball since they did develop TPUs in anticipation of heavy ML workloads in the future. They tripped over themselves getting an LLM out, but quickly recovered primarily because they didn't have to run to nvidia and beg for chips like everyone else in the field is stuck doing.
  - strangattractor 2y ago
    Like MS, Google is ubiquitous - search is much like Office and DOS before that. Anything OpenAPI or the other AI competitors create would normally be protected by patents for instance. Not so with an AI models. Google has the clout/know how to responded with similar technology - adding it to their ubiquitous search. People are both lazy and cheap. They will always go with cheaper and good enough.
    - harrall 2y ago
      Google invented the technology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need OpenAI was the copycat. If Google had patented this technique, OpenAI wouldn’t have existed.
bk496 2y ago
I wonder what takes more compute power: this or a blender render farm?
torginus 2y ago
I am not really technical in this domain, but why is everything text-to-X? Wouldn't it be possible to draw a rough sketch of a terrain, drop a picture of the character, draw a 3D spline for the walk path, while having a traditional keyframe style editor, and give certain points some keyframe actions (like character A turns on his flashlight at frame 60) - in short, something that allows minute creative control just like current tools do?
- Rebelgecko 2y ago
  You can do image+text as well (although maybe the results are better if you do raw image to prompted image to video?)
- minimaxir 2y ago
  Everything is text-to-X because it's less friction and therefore more fun. It's more a marketing thing. There are many workflows for using generative AI to adhere to specific functional requirements (the entire ComfyUI ecosystem, which includes tools such as LoRAs/ControlNet/InstantID for persistence) and there are many startups which abstract out generative AI pipelines for specific use cases. Those aren't fun, though.
- nodja 2y ago
  Dataset. To train these models you need inputs and expected output. For text-image pairs there exists vast amounts of data (in the billions). The models are trained on text + noise to output a denoised image. The dataset of sketch-image pairs are significantly smaller, but you can finetune an already trained text->image model using the smaller dataset by replacing the noise with a sketch, or anything else really, but the quality of the output of the finetuned model will highly depend on the base text->image model. You only need several thousand samples to create a decent (but not excellent) finetune. You can even do it without finetuning the base model and training a separate network that applies on top of base text->image model weights, this allows you to have a model that essentially can wear many hats and do all kinds of image transformations without affecting the performance of the base model. These are called controlnets and are popular with the stable diffusion family of models, but the general technique can be applied to almost any model.
volkk 2y ago
this is semi-relevant -- and I do love how technically amazing this all is, but a massive caveat for someone who's been dabbling hard in this space, (images+video) -- I cannot emphasize enough how draining text-2-<whatever> is. even when a result comes out that's kind of cool, I feel nothing because it wasn't really me who did it. I would say 97% of the time, the results are not what I want (and of course that's the case, it's just textual input) and so I change the text slightly, and a whole new thing comes out that is once again incorrect, and then I sit there for 5minutes while some new slop churns out of the slop factory. All of this back and forth drains not only my wallet/credits, but my patience and my soul. I really don't know how these "tools" are ever supposed to help creatives, short of generating short form ad content that few people really only want to work on anyway. So far the only products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet spam companies. The closest thing that I've bumped into that actually feels like it empowers artists is https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion that plugs into Krita and uses a combination of img2img with masking and txt2img. A slightly more rewarding feedback loop
- justlikereddit 2y ago
  [dead]
- dsign 2y ago
  > So far the only products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet spam companies. Help me here. If tiktok becomes filled with these, will it mean that watching tiktok "curated" algorithmic results will be about digesting AI content? Like, going to a restaurant to be served rubber balloons full of air that then people will do their best to swallow whole?[^1]. Could this be it? The demise of the algorithm? Or will people just swallow rubber balloons filled with air? [^1]: Do please use this sentence as a prompt :-)
hu3 2y ago
is there a tool to generate AI videos that doesn't change the original picture so much? Whisk redraws the entire thing and it barely resembles source picture.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Wan 2.1 can do a decent job with i2v. https://comfyanonymous.github.io/ComfyUI_examples/wan https://comfyanonymous.github.io/ComfyUI_examples/wan
- CSMastermind 2y ago
  You want Kling: https://klingai.com/global/ https://klingai.com/global/ Everything else performs terribly at that task, though a bunch including Sora technically have that functionality. Google's tool forcing you to redraw the image is silly.
- rishabhjain 2y ago
  Try Snowpixel https://snowpixel.app/ https://snowpixel.app/
wewewedxfgdf 2y ago
1: Press release about amazing AI development. 2: "Try it now!" the release always says. 3: I go try it. 4: Doesn't work. In this case, I give it a prompt to make a video and literally nothing happens, it goes back to the prompt. In the case of the breathtakingly astonishing Gemini 2.5 Coding - attach to source code file to the prompt "file type not supported". That's the pattern - I've come to expect it and was not disappointed with Google Gemini 2.5 coding nor with this video thing they are promoting here.
- siva7 2y ago
  you're using it wrong. change file ending to .txt instead
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bornfreddy 2y ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm or a helpful advice?
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      It's how you have to do it. The gemini model is excellent, but the implementation/chat environment seems like it was thrown together in a weekend as an afterthought. You cannot upload a .py file, but if you change the name to "main.txt" you can upload it, and it will automatically treat it as "main.py". Not sure how this hasn't been fixed yet, but it is google so...
      - bornfreddy 2y ago
        Thank you for explaining!
- throwup238 2y ago
  On the contrary I had completely written off Google until a few days ago. Gemini 2.5 Pro is finally competitive with GPT/Claude, their Deep Research is better and has a 20/day limit rather than 10/month, and now with a single run of Veo 2 I’ve gotten a much better and coherent video than from dozens of attempts at Sora. They finally seem to have gotten their heads collectively unstuck from their rear end (but yeah it sucks not having access).
ninininino 2y ago
As usual with Gen AI the curated demo itself displays misunderstanding and failure to meet the prompt. In the "Glacial Cavern" demo, the "candy figures" are not within the ice walls but are in the foreground/center of the scene. These things are great (I am not being sarcastic, I mean it when I say great) if and only if you don't actually care about all of your requirements being met, but if exactness matters they are mind-bogglingly frustrating because you'll get so close to what you want but some important detail is wrong.
- dsign 2y ago
  Indeed. Even a bad VFX artist has so much more control over what they do. I think that the day "text-to-video" reaches the level of control that said bad VFX artist has from week one, it will be because we have sentient AIs which will, for all ends and purposes, be people. That's not to say that there is no place for AI-generated content. Worst case scenario, it will be so good at poisoning the well that people will need to find another well.
Zopieux 2y ago
[flagged]
kumarm 2y ago
Pretty disappointed with content moderation on Veo2. Here are the steps I did: 1. Took a picture of me and asked to describe person in the image. 2. Used Imagegen to create the cartoon version using description. 3. Tried to use veo-2.0-generate-001 to generate video of person in image (holding a coffee cup in original image) drinking coffee and having a conversation. Video generation is blocked by content moderation.
bredren 2y ago
The UI on this product page does not make any sense to me. The three prompt workflows don’t stack in any obvious way, then seemingly combine on any submission to the main prompt area? They generate independent images. Gemini’s web interface is also way behind chatgpt and Claude. The mobile app is even worse. This is while having the champ 2.5 pro model in the pocket. It seems that web product resources are not getting adequate allocation to the AI group(s).
deyiao 2y ago
Content moderation is incredibly frustrating — it might even be the key reason why Veo2 and even Gemini could ultimately fail. I just want to make some fun videos where my kid plays a superhero, but it keeps failing.
- itake 2y ago
  I have the same issues with OpenAI. Supposedly Grok is better, but their quality isn't as high.
- voxic11 2y ago
  Are you trying to make your kid play a superhero or a specific copyrighted superhero? I'm just asking because I would expect them to attempt to prevent copyright infringement but I'm not sure why they would prevent you from depicting superheros which don't infringe on copyright. Maybe they are attempting to prevent any depictions of children, superhero or otherwise?
anonzzzies 2y ago
I have Advanced but no Veo2 model; is it controlled rollout or something again?
pdntspa 2y ago
I burned through $48 in GCP credit making 12x 8-second videos in Veo2. Beware...
Palmik 2y ago
There's also Google Vids, also using Veo 2 under the hood. Product confusion :) https://workspace.google.com/products/vids/ https://workspace.google.com/products/vids/
- j45 2y ago
  This seems very different and much more developed in a different direction.
tefkah 2y ago
evil technology
somishere 2y ago
Two notes: - is there a sly dig in there at Meta? Ice cream melting ... blue-suited hand - the Ghibli style feels controversial
snappyleads 2y ago
I been waiting along time for this - how long before we get to the 30sec - 1 min milestone for video generation - why is it capped - is it hardware limitations or software?

347 points by meetpateltech 2y ago

[flagged]

I think I would buy "yes" shares in a Polymarket event that predicts a motion picture created by a single person grossing more than $100M by 2027.

kevingadd 2y ago
I think the obstacles there are distribution and IP rights. I think we will see content like that find widespread appeal and success but actually turning it into $100m in revenue requires having the copyright (at present, not possible for AI-generated content) and being able to convince a distributor to invest in it. Those both seem like really tough things to solve.
- delichon 2y ago
  Purely AI-generated content -- with no human authorship -- is not eligible for US copyright protection. However if a human contributes meaningfully to the final output (editing, selection, arrangement, etc.) it becomes eligible. See Thaler v. Perlmutter (2023).
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    >is not eligible for US copyright protection Once industry adopts AI generation, which it will, a new law will be quickly signed. In a way, not allowing copyright of AI material really only serves a tiny group of people. "We want to empower everyone to bring their ideas to market, not just those with the ability to draw them" is not a particularly evil or amoral sentiment.
    - gh0stcat 2y ago
      As if the ability is not attainable, people want to be put on top of the mountain without any effort.
      - Workaccount2 2y ago
        When society climbs mountains, they eventually build elevators. Its a core functionality and the reason why we are so advanced. Just take a moment to realize how many peaks you already sit on top of, without even thinking about. Your home is overflowing with cheap wares from mountains ascended ages ago that you now have "no effort" access to.
- r58lf 2y ago
  Yeah, people underestimate how hard it is to get a movie into a theatre AND get people to pay for a ticket. Hollywood can barely get any well made movies past $100 million these days unless it's based on some well known franchise (minecraft, Captain America, Snow White) or it has some well known actor.
NitpickLawyer 2y ago
I think you might need qualifiers on that. Are we talking an unknown / unrelated person living in the proverbial basement, or are we talking a famous movie director? I could see Spielberg or Cameron managing to make something like that happen on their name + AI alone. If we're talking regular people, the best chance would be someone like Andy Weir, blogging their way to a successful book, and working on the side on a video project. I wouldn't be surprised if something along these lines happens sooner or later.
xnx 2y ago
We've got a pretty good datapoint along that trajectory with Flow. Almost entirely one person and has grossed $36 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
- jsheard 2y ago
  It was a small team for sure but not a one man show, there are 22 credits for the animation work alone, plus 13 more for sound and music, not counting the director.
  - xnx 2y ago
    > Almost entirely one person It is closer to one than number the staff of other animated films. It's a good data point to keep in mind as AI tools enable even smaller teams to do more.
- karolist 2y ago
  Went to the cinema with my kids for the 2nd time to watch this one, was pleasantly surprised to read this movie was done using Blender, highly recommended.
- mattfrommars 2y ago
  One person? What do you mean? It literally says in the wiki more than one. This isn't solo dev game project.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
silksowed 2y ago
very excited to play around. will be attempting to see if i can get character coherence between runs. the issue with the 8s limit is its hard to stitch them together if characters are not consistent. good for short form distribution but not youtube mini series or eventual movies. another comment about IP license is indeed an issue but its why i am looking towards classical works beyond their copyright dates. my goal is to eventually work from short form, to youtube to eventual short films. tools are limited in their current form but the future is promising if i get started now.
jddj 2y ago
I came to the same sort of conclusion when watching Kitsune, which I think was one person and VEO https://vimeo.com/1047370252 https://vimeo.com/1047370252 Granted, 5 minutes isn't 1h30 but it's not a million miles away either.
- xrd 2y ago
  It's fantastic. I just watched Kitsune, thanks for sharing. It reminds me why Flow was so good. Flow was great because I could see the shader artifacts. It was the opposite of a Disney model, it was not polished and perfect. That's why I loved it. Disney would never do a movie with a plot like Flow. They would write and rewrite it and it would be a perfect example of humanity, but totally devoid of the humanity behind it. It is ironic that this new coming wave of AI generated (or AI assisted) films feel like they have more human craftmanship than Disney films, when honestly it is the opposite. Disney has incredible and brilliant animators, but that is all crushed behind the merchandising and gross behemoth of the Disney corporation. I used to love seeing independent films. Those art house theaters really only exist in places like Portland, OR these days. But, I'm excited about the next wave of film because it'll permit small storytelling, and that's going to be great.
- gh0stcat 2y ago
  This actually so amateurish and cliche it's painful. The fact people like this shows that art never had a chance when the masses have no taste. This makes me depressed for artists and the future.
  - jddj 2y ago
    It won't be novel the 100th or 1000th or millionth time, and standards will rise accordingly. But for now it is, or at least 2 months ago it was. Someone created that relatively coherent 5min animated story largely by communicating with a computer in natural language. The masses have had plenty worse
  - switchbak 2y ago
    Well sure, but we're in the early stages here smashing bones together. When a few million bored teenagers bang at this, I bet you'll see perspectives you've never thought of. It'd be like having someone in the 1920's listen to Nirvana - just a completely different experience. Given the dreck coming out of Hollywood, I'm open to that, even if other folks have to wade through a million shitty videos for me to get it.
tracerbulletx 2y ago
Everyone keeps ignoring supply and demand when talking about the impacts of AI. Let's just assume it really gets so good you can do this and it doesn't suck. Yes the costs will get so low that there will be almost no barrier to making content but if there is no barrier to making content, the ROI will be massive, and so everyone will be doing it, you can more or less have the exact movie you want in your head on demand, and even if you want a bespoke movie from an artist with great taste and a point of view there will be 10,000 of them every year.
- GloamingNiblets 2y ago
  A good parallel is writing books. Books can cost little to write and publish, but their success is Pareto distributed, not Normally distributed.
  - mlboss 2y ago
    Writing book is really expensive. You have to think and put words on paper that engages the read. It is really hard.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  Most of us have no idea what movies we want. The most delightful films are a total surprise (other than the drones who watch every Marvel film of course).
- nmilo 2y ago
  It will be like YouTube. Distribution will be hard and most of it will be slop but every now and then you’ll discover something so good and so creative and it couldn’t have possibly existed before that it makes the whole experience worth it. The best creative works are led by one person and I’m excited to see what people can come up with.
- yorwba 2y ago
  And one of those 10,000 will have a multimillion marketing budget and people are talking about it online and remixing it into memes and it will make a lot more money than the second-most popular movie, even though there's no discernable quality difference.
colesantiago 2y ago
My prediction is on track to this and this was made only 4 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951
- delichon 2y ago
  There may be a solo (not Han) movie good enough to compete in five years, but I doubt that Academy voters will be that welcoming of the tech that can obliterate most of their jobs by then.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    Based on the training data being pop culture, we may even get a good Han Solo movie from tools like this. Starring young Ford.
  - switchbak 2y ago
    If AI can fix the terrible ending that was Game of Thrones, then perhaps it won't have been a complete waste after all.
    - anshumankmr 2y ago
      What ending for Game of Thrones? Wasn't it cancelled after Season 6?
SirMaster 2y ago
Well text generation is way ahead of video generation. Have we seen anyone create something like a best selling or high grossing novel with an LLM yet?
- delichon 2y ago
  That's why going from one person to zero persons will be so hard. But one Kubrick/Carmack and a bunch of AI could make a compelling movie now.
bookofjoe 2y ago
Me too. Sam Altman recently predicted that we will see a one-person unicorn company in the near future.
hammock 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) $36 million dollars and an Academy Award. A l m o s t done by just one person. And entirely with open source software. The guy's previous movie was a true one-man show but didn't really get screenings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(2019_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Away_(2019_film)
- farzd 2y ago
  `The movie "Flow" cost approximately $3.7 million to $4 million to produce` - big budget for almost one person.
- machomaster 2y ago
  Not true. Dozens of people participated in creating this movie.
baxtr 2y ago
I can’t exactly say why, but I find this "single person $1B company" meme utterly annoying.
tclancy 2y ago
But will it cost less than $100M to render?

xnx 2y ago

This is amazing. I wouldn't think that something as computationally expensive as generating 8 second videos would be available outside of paid API anytime soon.

Shadow360 2y ago

[flagged]

minimaxir 2y ago

Whisk itself (https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk) was released a few months ago under the radar as a demo for Imagen 3 and it's actually fun to play with and surprisingly robust given its particular implementation. It uses a prompt transmutation trick (convert the uploaded images into a textual description; can verify by viewing the description of the uploaded image) and the strength of Imagen 3's actually modern text encoder to be able to adhere to those long transmuted descriptions for Subject/Scene/Style.

torginus 2y ago
Why text? why not encode the image into some latent space representation, so that it can survive a round-trip more or less faithfully?
- minimaxir 2y ago
  Because Imagen 3 is a text-to-image model, not an image-to-image model, so the inputs have to be some form of text. Multimodal models such as 4o image generation or Gemini 2.0 which can take in both text and image inputs do encode image inputs to a latent space through a Vision Transformer, but not reverseable or losslessly.
  - waffletower 2y ago
    Typically generative models, particularly diffusion models like Imagen 3, are easily architected to support several vectors toward the latent space of the model. It is not open source so there might be an architectural reason I cannot see, but I don't think the public interface to the model should suggest its capabilities -- it is uncommon for image to image not to be supported in open source image generation models, for example. However, there are definite legal reasons not to provide such a vector in a public facing model like Imagen 3.
  - waffletower 2y ago
    And Gemini gave the Yes-man treatment to my statement here :D "In summary: Your assessment aligns well with the technical realities of diffusion models and the practical, legal, and safety considerations large companies face when deploying powerful generative AI tools publicly. It's entirely feasible that Imagen 3's underlying architecture could support image inputs, but Google has chosen not to expose this capability publicly due to the associated risks and complexities."

smallnix 2y ago

Brave to make ads with the Ghibli style. Would have thought that's burned by now.

minimaxir 2y ago
Looking at the video, I think there's shenanigans afoot. The anime picture they input as a sample image is more generic anime, but the example output image is clearly Ghibli-esque in the same vein as the 4o image generations.
gh0stcat 2y ago
No one has any morals or soul at this point. It's all garbage in, garbage out.
- astrange 2y ago
  Do you know the name of the artist at Studio Ghibli you're defending? (It isn't "Hayao Miyazaki".)

byearthithatius 2y ago

Very impressive release compared to what was possible even a single year ago. It feels like we are in a great state right now with respect to ML where all the big companies are competing and pushing each other to make the tech better. This is rare nowadays in America (or in general).

strangattractor 2y ago

Google is the new Microsoft in the sense that they can Embrace, extend, and extinguish their competition. No matter what xAI or OpenAI or "anything"AI tries to build Google will eventually copy and destroy them at scale. AI (or A1 as our Secretary of Education calls it) is interesting because it is more difficult to protect the IP other than as trade secrets.

mritun 2y ago
> Google will eventually copy… Weird take given Google basically invented and released through well written papers and open-source software the modern deep learning stack which all others build on. Google was being disses because they failed to make any product and were increasingly looking like Kodak/Xerox one trick pony. It seems they have woken up from whatever slumber they were in
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  They didn't entirely drop the ball since they did develop TPUs in anticipation of heavy ML workloads in the future. They tripped over themselves getting an LLM out, but quickly recovered primarily because they didn't have to run to nvidia and beg for chips like everyone else in the field is stuck doing.
- strangattractor 2y ago
  Like MS, Google is ubiquitous - search is much like Office and DOS before that. Anything OpenAPI or the other AI competitors create would normally be protected by patents for instance. Not so with an AI models. Google has the clout/know how to responded with similar technology - adding it to their ubiquitous search. People are both lazy and cheap. They will always go with cheaper and good enough.
  - harrall 2y ago
    Google invented the technology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need OpenAI was the copycat. If Google had patented this technique, OpenAI wouldn’t have existed.

bk496 2y ago

I wonder what takes more compute power: this or a blender render farm?

torginus 2y ago

I am not really technical in this domain, but why is everything text-to-X? Wouldn't it be possible to draw a rough sketch of a terrain, drop a picture of the character, draw a 3D spline for the walk path, while having a traditional keyframe style editor, and give certain points some keyframe actions (like character A turns on his flashlight at frame 60) - in short, something that allows minute creative control just like current tools do?

Rebelgecko 2y ago
You can do image+text as well (although maybe the results are better if you do raw image to prompted image to video?)
minimaxir 2y ago
Everything is text-to-X because it's less friction and therefore more fun. It's more a marketing thing. There are many workflows for using generative AI to adhere to specific functional requirements (the entire ComfyUI ecosystem, which includes tools such as LoRAs/ControlNet/InstantID for persistence) and there are many startups which abstract out generative AI pipelines for specific use cases. Those aren't fun, though.
nodja 2y ago
Dataset. To train these models you need inputs and expected output. For text-image pairs there exists vast amounts of data (in the billions). The models are trained on text + noise to output a denoised image. The dataset of sketch-image pairs are significantly smaller, but you can finetune an already trained text->image model using the smaller dataset by replacing the noise with a sketch, or anything else really, but the quality of the output of the finetuned model will highly depend on the base text->image model. You only need several thousand samples to create a decent (but not excellent) finetune. You can even do it without finetuning the base model and training a separate network that applies on top of base text->image model weights, this allows you to have a model that essentially can wear many hats and do all kinds of image transformations without affecting the performance of the base model. These are called controlnets and are popular with the stable diffusion family of models, but the general technique can be applied to almost any model.

volkk 2y ago

this is semi-relevant -- and I do love how technically amazing this all is, but a massive caveat for someone who's been dabbling hard in this space, (images+video) -- I cannot emphasize enough how draining text-2-<whatever> is. even when a result comes out that's kind of cool, I feel nothing because it wasn't really me who did it. I would say 97% of the time, the results are not what I want (and of course that's the case, it's just textual input) and so I change the text slightly, and a whole new thing comes out that is once again incorrect, and then I sit there for 5minutes while some new slop churns out of the slop factory. All of this back and forth drains not only my wallet/credits, but my patience and my soul. I really don't know how these "tools" are ever supposed to help creatives, short of generating short form ad content that few people really only want to work on anyway. So far the only products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet spam companies. The closest thing that I've bumped into that actually feels like it empowers artists is https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion that plugs into Krita and uses a combination of img2img with masking and txt2img. A slightly more rewarding feedback loop

justlikereddit 2y ago
[dead]
dsign 2y ago
> So far the only products spawning from these tools are tiktok/general internet spam companies. Help me here. If tiktok becomes filled with these, will it mean that watching tiktok "curated" algorithmic results will be about digesting AI content? Like, going to a restaurant to be served rubber balloons full of air that then people will do their best to swallow whole?[^1]. Could this be it? The demise of the algorithm? Or will people just swallow rubber balloons filled with air? [^1]: Do please use this sentence as a prompt :-)

hu3 2y ago

is there a tool to generate AI videos that doesn't change the original picture so much? Whisk redraws the entire thing and it barely resembles source picture.

vunderba 2y ago
Wan 2.1 can do a decent job with i2v. https://comfyanonymous.github.io/ComfyUI_examples/wan https://comfyanonymous.github.io/ComfyUI_examples/wan
CSMastermind 2y ago
You want Kling: https://klingai.com/global/ https://klingai.com/global/ Everything else performs terribly at that task, though a bunch including Sora technically have that functionality. Google's tool forcing you to redraw the image is silly.
rishabhjain 2y ago
Try Snowpixel https://snowpixel.app/ https://snowpixel.app/

wewewedxfgdf 2y ago

1: Press release about amazing AI development. 2: "Try it now!" the release always says. 3: I go try it. 4: Doesn't work. In this case, I give it a prompt to make a video and literally nothing happens, it goes back to the prompt. In the case of the breathtakingly astonishing Gemini 2.5 Coding - attach to source code file to the prompt "file type not supported". That's the pattern - I've come to expect it and was not disappointed with Google Gemini 2.5 coding nor with this video thing they are promoting here.

siva7 2y ago
you're using it wrong. change file ending to .txt instead
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bornfreddy 2y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcasm or a helpful advice?
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    It's how you have to do it. The gemini model is excellent, but the implementation/chat environment seems like it was thrown together in a weekend as an afterthought. You cannot upload a .py file, but if you change the name to "main.txt" you can upload it, and it will automatically treat it as "main.py". Not sure how this hasn't been fixed yet, but it is google so...
    - bornfreddy 2y ago
      Thank you for explaining!
throwup238 2y ago
On the contrary I had completely written off Google until a few days ago. Gemini 2.5 Pro is finally competitive with GPT/Claude, their Deep Research is better and has a 20/day limit rather than 10/month, and now with a single run of Veo 2 I’ve gotten a much better and coherent video than from dozens of attempts at Sora. They finally seem to have gotten their heads collectively unstuck from their rear end (but yeah it sucks not having access).

ninininino 2y ago

As usual with Gen AI the curated demo itself displays misunderstanding and failure to meet the prompt. In the "Glacial Cavern" demo, the "candy figures" are not within the ice walls but are in the foreground/center of the scene. These things are great (I am not being sarcastic, I mean it when I say great) if and only if you don't actually care about all of your requirements being met, but if exactness matters they are mind-bogglingly frustrating because you'll get so close to what you want but some important detail is wrong.

dsign 2y ago
Indeed. Even a bad VFX artist has so much more control over what they do. I think that the day "text-to-video" reaches the level of control that said bad VFX artist has from week one, it will be because we have sentient AIs which will, for all ends and purposes, be people. That's not to say that there is no place for AI-generated content. Worst case scenario, it will be so good at poisoning the well that people will need to find another well.

Zopieux 2y ago

[flagged]

kumarm 2y ago

Pretty disappointed with content moderation on Veo2. Here are the steps I did: 1. Took a picture of me and asked to describe person in the image. 2. Used Imagegen to create the cartoon version using description. 3. Tried to use veo-2.0-generate-001 to generate video of person in image (holding a coffee cup in original image) drinking coffee and having a conversation. Video generation is blocked by content moderation.

bredren 2y ago

The UI on this product page does not make any sense to me. The three prompt workflows don’t stack in any obvious way, then seemingly combine on any submission to the main prompt area? They generate independent images. Gemini’s web interface is also way behind chatgpt and Claude. The mobile app is even worse. This is while having the champ 2.5 pro model in the pocket. It seems that web product resources are not getting adequate allocation to the AI group(s).

deyiao 2y ago

Content moderation is incredibly frustrating — it might even be the key reason why Veo2 and even Gemini could ultimately fail. I just want to make some fun videos where my kid plays a superhero, but it keeps failing.

itake 2y ago
I have the same issues with OpenAI. Supposedly Grok is better, but their quality isn't as high.
voxic11 2y ago
Are you trying to make your kid play a superhero or a specific copyrighted superhero? I'm just asking because I would expect them to attempt to prevent copyright infringement but I'm not sure why they would prevent you from depicting superheros which don't infringe on copyright. Maybe they are attempting to prevent any depictions of children, superhero or otherwise?

anonzzzies 2y ago

I have Advanced but no Veo2 model; is it controlled rollout or something again?

pdntspa 2y ago

I burned through $48 in GCP credit making 12x 8-second videos in Veo2. Beware...

Palmik 2y ago

There's also Google Vids, also using Veo 2 under the hood. Product confusion :) https://workspace.google.com/products/vids/ https://workspace.google.com/products/vids/

j45 2y ago
This seems very different and much more developed in a different direction.

tefkah 2y ago

evil technology

somishere 2y ago

Two notes: - is there a sly dig in there at Meta? Ice cream melting ... blue-suited hand - the Ghibli style feels controversial

snappyleads 2y ago

I been waiting along time for this - how long before we get to the 30sec - 1 min milestone for video generation - why is it capped - is it hardware limitations or software?