Okay, so the AI company Tavus introduced an AI video model today that 26 of 54 people thought was a real human after a one-minute face-to-face call.

It’s called Griffin. And instead of the usual AI stack where speech, an LLM, voice, and avatar animation take turns, Griffin watches your video and listens while it’s talking. — Read More

I remember a few years ago when I tried Deforum for the first time.

… Fast-forward three years, and we have models like MiniMax H3, Kling 3.0, Sora 2, Wan 2.2, etc. These models are not only able to produce well-defined and good-looking frames, but also maintain a high degree of temporal consistency.

In this post, I wanted to share with you the main technical advancements that allowed for such an unbelievable improvement in visual quality and temporal consistency. — Read More

World models generate, reconstruct, and simulate any possible world. They understand how worlds appear, behave, and evolve so that we can render imagined worlds for creative users, simulate the real world in high fidelity, and help robots plan actions. At World Labs, we build these general purpose world models in pursuit of spatial intelligence.

Today we are introducing Atlas, our next-generation world model. Atlas is an omni model that we pretrained from scratch to natively operate on text, images, video, and 3D. It is a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer: all inputs are combined into a shared spatial context. Atlas uses that context to generate what comes next, staying consistent in 3D with everything it has seen and imagining what lies beyond it. — Read More

AI models produce output based on context. Context is everything the model can see when it does the work: your request, plus whatever instructions, standards, examples, and background information come along with it.

As more interface work is AI-generated, the output of research and design shifts from documents written for humans to curated context that guides AI. — Read More

Alibaba Cloud on Sunday released HappyHorse 1.1, a major upgrade to its AI video generation model that the company says delivers production-ready video synthesis across core content creation scenarios. The model is now live on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio with full API access for enterprise customers and developers, accompanied by a 40% sitewide launch discount for the first two weeks.

The release arrives at a moment of remarkable upheaval in the AI video generation market — and Alibaba appears keenly aware of the timing. OpenAI discontinued Sora after it proved financially unsustainable. ByteDance indefinitely shelved the international rollout of Seedance 2.0 following a barrage of copyright complaints from Hollywood studios. For enterprise procurement teams that had been evaluating or integrating those tools into marketing, advertising, and content production workflows, the competitive landscape has contracted sharply in a matter of months. — Read More

There’s a handmade, retro-looking radio sitting in our office that plays only four pre-programmed stations, none of which are run by humans. This is our latest project at Andon Labs, where we’re exploring what happens when AI runs real businesses autonomously. In the past, we’ve let our AI agents run a store, a cafe, and various vending machines. Now, though, we wanted to see if they could run a company in the media sector. — Read More

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The podcast sector suddenly may have a big new player: Amazon‘s Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant.

Alexa has been answering billions of users’ queries since it was first released in 2014. Now Amazon is positioning Alexa+’s extended answers on any number of different topics as “podcasts,” completely compiled using AI, the company announced Monday. — Read More

A hot potato: With generative AI becoming more prevalent in society, are we heading toward a future where an AI-created actor or script wins an Oscar? If it does ever happen, it certainly won’t be anytime soon: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has just banned their eligibility for awards.

The Academy clarified rules for two categories related to AI, writes Vanity Fair. The first states that the only acting roles eligible for Oscar nominations are those “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent.” Screenplays, meanwhile, must be human-authored to be eligible.

While this all sounds like something we’ll have to deal with in the future, it’s happening now. — Read More

#vfx

Higgsfield AI is a generative video model and platform designed for creating high-fidelity, controllable, and stylistically consistent video content from text and image prompts. Unlike many early-generation AI video tools that produce short, often disjointed clips, Higgsfield focuses on solving one of the biggest problems for professional use: consistency. It aims to give creators the ability to maintain the same character, aesthetic, and environment across multiple shots, making it a viable tool for narrative and commercial projects. — Read More

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