Runway, the company that created AI effects for the Oscar-winning film "Everything Everywhere All At Once", announced a model for creating videos from text and quickly went viral.
Launched in early July, the Gen-3 Alpha is a major step up from the previous free Gen-2 model, described by Runway as "a significant improvement in fidelity, consistency and movement compared to before". Besides, the video creation speed is also much faster than the previous generation.
Immediately after its appearance, on social networks, many people shared videos created by Gen-3 Alpha and attracted hundreds of comments. Most praised the new tool for being "realistic", "unimaginable", and even worried that cinematographers and video content creators "will lose their jobs sooner than expected". They also rated the new tool "a 9 out of 10" and as Sora's "biggest competitor", developed by OpenAI.
According to Runway, Gen-3 Alpha is built on a new generation technology platform and is trained simultaneously on image and video data to improve realism. Besides, the company also added AI algorithms to improve and control motion, "understand" physical movement in the real world and accurately reproduce it for output video. "The result is that everyone can create videos that are close to reality," the company representative wrote on the blog.
Compared to the Gen-2, which produces a four-second video in about a minute, the Gen-3 Alpha can output a minimum 10-second video in less than 30 seconds. Users can import videos, images or just short text to create videos.
While Sora is not yet available to end users, Gen-3 Alpha has been released but costs $15 per month or $144 per year.
Runway was born in 2018, is a famous AI startup with 45 employees. The company is providing tools to help users quickly edit videos, such as removing fonts or adding effects. For example, in the 2023 Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All At Once, visual effects artist Evan Halleck used AI from Runway to create effects. "AI cuts subjects better than the naked eye," he said. "I can cut a character out of the frame and place it neatly on a photo in a few minutes, compared to half a day like before."
Runway is valued at $1.5 billion after raising $141 million from investors such as Google and Nvidia. According to The Information on July 3, the company may be about to receive an additional capital of 450 million USD, thereby giving it a valuation of about four billion USD.