I regret making fun of Meta's AI video efforts - Movie Gen looks shockingly impressive

I may have scoffed a little two years ago when Meta announced that it was working on an AI video generator with the stunningly unimaginative name Make-A-Video. After CEO Mark Zuckerberg's misguided Metaverse obsession, it seemed like another silly way for the company that owns Facebook and Instagram to waste huge amounts of resources researching something that had little to do with its core business and Creepy, flawed videos produced This could hardly serve as a meme.

That was in October 2022. Make-A-Video was never released, but Meta continued to tinker. Now there's just a glimpse of its latest AI video generator. And while “Movie Gen” may just have a slightly better name, its edition seems light years ahead of its predecessor. It might even be better than Sora from Runway and Open AI.

Meta says Movie Gen can create videos of up to 16 seconds in various aspect ratios and audio of up to 45 seconds. The model is claimed to compare well with OpenAI's Runway, Sora and Kling, and the few examples provided support this. Human and animal anatomy, clothing and other objects are generally convincing, if sometimes still a bit blurry or too sharp and cartoonish. Lighting and shadows are particularly impressive.

And a public release? While OpenAI originally said Sora would see a public release this year, Meta appears to be in no rush to release its model. Chris Cox, chief product officer, wrote in Threads: “We're not ready to release this as a product any time soon – it's still expensive and the generation time is too long – but we wanted to share where we're at, there “The results are pretty impressive.”

Sora and Runway are considered the most powerful AI video generators to date, and the latter's developer recently inked a deal to develop a custom model for film and television producer Lionsgate. When released, Meta's AI video generator will likely also compete with Adobe Firefly Video, which the company behind Photoshop and Premiere Pro has promised will be “coming soon.” At the moment, Meta's model looks more powerful, but Firefly Video is likely to have practical advantages such as being able to be used directly in Premiere Pro.

It is not clear how either model was trained. There have been allegations that Runway was trained using YouTube videos, which the YouTube CEO said was a violation of the platform's terms of service. According to Meta, Movie Gen was trained using a “combination of licensed and publicly available datasets.” It wasn't specified which, but Meta has direct access to vast amounts of video data through its own products, Instagram and Facebook.

I regret making fun of Meta's AI video efforts – Movie Gen looks shockingly impressive

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I regret making fun of Meta's AI video efforts – Movie Gen looks shockingly impressive

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