Generative AI’s next frontier is video

Runway, which makes AI-based film and editing tools, announced the availability of its Gen 2 AI system via a waitlist; people can sign up for access to it on a private Discord channel that the company plans to add more users to each week. — Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress with still images. For months, services like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion have been creating beautiful, arresting and sometimes unsettling pictures. Now, a startup called Runway AI Inc. is taking the next step: AI-generated video.

On Monday, New York-based Runway announced the availability of its Gen 2 system, which generates short snippets of video from a few words of user prompts. Users can type in a description of what they want to see, for example: "a cat walking in the rain,” and it will generate a roughly 3-second video clip showing just that, or something close. Alternately, users can upload an image as a reference point for the system as well as a prompt.