Today in Generative Media

Veo 2 trounces Sora; AI addresses 'sameness problem'; Odyssey's world models

News and Opinion

• Google's AI video generator blows OpenAI's Sora out of the water. YouTube may be a big reason. (Business Insider)

• Writer’s new AI model aims to fix the ‘sameness problem’ in generative content (VentureBeat)

• Generative World Models for Film, Gaming, and Beyond (Odyssey) We’re excited to welcome Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, to our board. Together, we’re pioneering generative world models, beginning with Explorer.

• AI is burying company websites in search results, but Otterly.AI thinks it can help (TechCrunch)

• Why Does OpenAI Need So Much Money? (New York Times)

• Who wants ‘Her’-like AI that gets stuff wrong? (TechCrunch)

• Where Humans Still Have the Edge on AI (Harvard Business Review)

• Cloud AI Startup Vultr Raises $333 Million at $3.5 Billion Valuation (Wall Street Journal)

• AI Startup Perplexity Closes Funding Round at $9 Billion Value (Yahoo Finance)

• Perplexity acquires Carbon to connect AI search to your work files (TechCrunch)

Software

• Ideogram Batch Generation is here! (X) Enhance your creative workflow by simplifying image creation at scale – no more manual adjustments or constant supervision needed. Simply upload a spreadsheet with prompts and settings to generate images in bulk. Now available for Ideogram Pro users.

• Krea Editor is here. Our new editing tool is now available in open beta. Free for everyone. (X)

• Moonshine Web: Real-time in-browser speech recognition that's faster and more accurate than Whisper (X)

• GitHub is making its AI programming Copilot free for VS Code developers — with limits (VentureBeat)

Research

• Genesis: A Generative and Universal Physics Engine for Robotics and Beyond (project page)

• Stereo4D: Learning How Things Move in 3D from Internet Stereo Videos (project page)

• MegaSynth Scaling Up 3D Scene Reconstruction with Synthesized Data (project page)

• Marigold-DC: Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Completion with Guided Diffusion (project page)

• Deformable Radial Kernel Splatting (project page)

• Lifting Motion to the 3D World via 2D Diffusion (project page)

• 3DGUT: Enabling Distorted Cameras and Secondary Rays in Gaussian Splatting (project page)

• Gaussian Billboards: Expressive 2D Gaussian Splatting with Textures (arXiv)