During Google Cloud Next 2024 in Las Vegas, Google announced an updated version of its text-to-image generator Imagen 2 on Vertex AI that has the ability to generate video clips of up to four seconds. Google calls this feature “text-to-live images,” and it essentially delivers animated GIFs at 24 fps and 360×640 pixel resolution, though Google says there will be “continuous enhancements.” Imagen 2 can also generate text, emblems and logos in different languages, and has the ability to overlay those elements on existing images like business cards, apparel and products. Continue reading Google Imagen 2 Now Generates 4-Second Clips on Vertex AI

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Adobe have unveiled a new AI acceleration tool that makes generative apps like DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion up to 30x faster by reducing the process to a single step. The new approach, called distribution matching distillation, or DMD, maintains or enhances image quality while greatly streamlining the process. Theoretically, the technique “marries the principles of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with those of diffusion models,” consolidating “the hundred steps of iterative refinement required by current diffusion models” into one step, MIT PhD student and project lead Tianwei Yin says. Continue reading New Tech from MIT, Adobe Advances Generative AI Imaging

OpenAI’s Sora text- and image-to-video tool isn’t publicly available yet, but the company is showing what it’s capable of by putting it in the hands of seven artists. The results — from a short film about a balloon man to a hybrid flamingo giraffe — are stirring excitement and priming the pump for what OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says will be a 2024 general release. Challenges include making it cheaper to run and enhancing guardrails. Since introducing Sora last month, OpenAI says it’s “been working with visual artists, designers, creative directors and filmmakers to learn how Sora might aid in their creative process.” Continue reading OpenAI Releases Early Demos of Sora Video Generation Tool

Stability AI has released Stable Video 3D, a generative video model based on the company’s foundation model Stable Video Diffusion. SV3D, as it’s called,  comes in two versions. Both can generate and animate multi-view 3D meshes from a single image. The more advanced version also let users set “specified camera paths” for a “filmed” look to the video generation. “By adapting our Stable Video Diffusion image-to-video diffusion model with the addition of camera path conditioning, Stable Video 3D is able to generate multi-view videos of an object,” the company explains. Continue reading Stable Video 3D Generates Orbital Animation from One Image

Lightricks, the company behind apps including Facetune, Photoleap and Videoleap, has come up with a text-to-video tool called LTX Studio that it is being positioned as a turnkey AI tool for filmmakers and other creators. “From concept to creation,” the new app aims to enable “the transformation of a single idea into a cohesive, AI-generated video.” Currently waitlisted, Lightricks says it will make the web-based tool available to the public for free, at least initially, beginning in April, allowing users to “direct each scene down to specific camera angles with specialized AI.” Continue reading Lightricks LTX Studio Is a Text-to-Video Filmmaking Platform

Stability AI, purveyor of the popular Stable Diffusion image generator, has introduced a completely new model called Stable Cascade. Now in preview, Stable Cascade uses a different architecture than Stable Diffusion’s SDXL that the UK company’s researchers say is more efficient. Cascade builds on a compression architecture called Würstchen (German for “sausage”) that Stability began sharing in research papers early last year. Würstchen is a three-stage process that includes two-step encoding. It uses fewer parameters, meaning less data to train on, greater speed and reduced costs. Continue reading Stability AI Advances Image Generation with Stable Cascade

Intel has teamed with Florida-based investment firm DigitalBridge to launch Articul8, an independent company catering to the GenAI software needs of enterprise customers by offering secure, vertically-optimized full-stack solutions. Intel says the GenAI system can read text and images. It was reportedly developed by Intel to meet the security needs of Boston Consulting Group to run in its data centers, and later scaled for general enterprise use. Articul8 aims to keep customer data, training and inference “within the enterprise security perimeter,” Intel notes, adding that customers can choose between cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment. Continue reading Intel, DigitalBridge Launch GenAI Software Firm for Enterprise

As the pressure ratchets up for AI companies to go beyond the wow factor and make money, Stability AI has formalized three subscription tiers as it seeks to expand commercial use of its open-source, multimodal core models. The Stability AI Membership offerings include a free tier for personal and research (i.e., non-commercial) use, a professional tier that costs $20 a month, and a custom-priced enterprise tier for large outfits. The company says that with the three tiers it is “striking a balance between fostering competitiveness and maintaining openness in AI technologies.” Continue reading Stability AI Is Offering Paid Membership for Commercial Users

Microsoft has added generative music capabilities to its Copilot chatbot by integrating a plugin from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup Suno AI. Microsoft calls Suno “a leader in AI music technology, pioneering the ability to generate complete songs — lyrics, instrumentals, and singing voices — from a single sentence.” Suno offers a generative tool on Discord. The Copilot plugin is specific to Microsoft, though the biggest difference is it will only generate one song per prompt as opposed to the app offered directly by Suno, which provides two. The songs are generally a minute or two in length, and come with lyric sheets. Continue reading Suno Plugin Gives Microsoft Copilot a Music Creation Feature

Meta Platforms is moving Imagine with Meta from its test bed as a generative AI experience in chats to a standalone experience on the Web that allows users to create high-resolution images using natural language text prompts. That is one of more than 20 generative AI features Meta is deploying to create new business opportunities globally leveraging AI across search, ads, business messaging and more. While most will wind up on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, some say Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram platforms have plateaued at 2 to 3 billion users per month, circumscribing ad growth. Continue reading Standalone Image Generator Is Among New AI Tools by Meta

IBM and Meta Platforms have launched the AI Alliance, a coalition of companies and educational institutions committed to responsible, transparent development of artificial intelligence. The group launched this week with more than 50 global founding participants from industry, startup, academia, research and government. Among the members and collaborators: AMD, CERN, Cerebras, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, Hugging Face, Intel, Linux Foundation, NASA, Oracle, Red Hat, Sony Group, Stability AI, the University of Tokyo and Yale Engineering. The group’s stated purpose is “to support open innovation and open science in AI.” Continue reading IBM and Meta Debut AI Alliance for Safe Artificial Intelligence

The Google and Nvidia-backed AI video startup Runway is partnering with Getty Images to develop Runway Getty Images Model (RGM), which it is positioning as a new type of generative AI model capable of “providing a new way to bring ideas and stories to life through video” for enterprise customers using copyright compliant means. Targeting Hollywood studios, advertising, media and broadcast clients, RGM will “provide a baseline model upon which companies can build their own custom models for the generation of video content,” Runway explains. Continue reading Runway Teams with Getty on AI Video for Hollywood and Ads

Stability AI, developer of Stable Diffusion (one of the leading visual content generators, alongside Midjourney and DALL-E), has introduced SDXL Turbo — a new AI model that demonstrates more of the latent possibilities of the common diffusion generation approach: images that update in real time as the user’s prompt updates. This feature was always a possibility even with previous diffusion models given text and images are comprehended differently across linear time, but increased efficiency of generation algorithms and the steady accretion of GPUs and TPUs in a developer’s data center makes the experience more magical. Continue reading Stability AI Intros Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model

Amazon is debuting its Titan Image Generator in preview for AWS Bedrock customers. The new Titan generative AI model can create new images from a text prompt or existing image, and automatically adds watermarking to protect intellectual property. The move into generative imaging puts Amazon in competition with a growing field that includes large firms like Adobe and Google. Unlike those companies and others, the e-retail giant is at present focusing exclusively on enterprise customers. Amazon Bedrock is a managed service giving developers access to a range of foundation models from companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Amazon itself. Continue reading Amazon Previews Titan Image Generator for Bedrock Clients

Stability AI has opened research preview on its first foundation model for generative video, Stable Video Diffusion, offering text-to-video and image-to-video. Based on the company’s Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, the new open-source model generates video by animating existing still frames, including “multi-view synthesis.” While the company plans to enhance and extend the model’s capabilities, it currently comes in two versions: SVD, which transforms stills into 576×1024 videos of 14 frames, and SVD-XT that generates up to 24 frames — each at between three and 30 frames per second. Continue reading Stability Introduces GenAI Video Model: Stable Video Diffusion