Over the past month, we've seen a rapid cadence of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's been making the AI community's head spin. It has also poured fuel on the fire of the OpenAI-Google rivalry, an accelerating game of one-upmanship taking place unusually close to the Christmas holiday.

"How are people surviving with the firehose of AI updates that are coming out," wrote one user on X last Friday, which is still a hotbed of AI-related conversation. "in the last <24 hours we got gemini flash 2.0 and chatGPT with screenshare, deep research, pika 2, sora, chatGPT projects, anthropic clio, wtf it never ends."

Rumors travel quickly in the AI world, and people in the AI industry had been expecting OpenAI to ship some major products in December. Once OpenAI announced "12 days of OpenAI" earlier this month, Google jumped into gear and seemingly decided to try to one-up its rival on several counts. So far, the strategy appears to be working, but it's coming at the cost of the rest of the world being able to absorb the implications of the new releases.

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The AI-generated video scene has been hopping this year (or twirling wildly, as the case may be). This past week alone we've seen releases or announcements of OpenAI's Sora, Pika AI's Pika 2, Google's Veo 2, and Minimax's video-01-live. It's frankly hard to keep up, and even tougher to test them all. But recently, we put a new open-weights AI video synthesis model, Tencent's HunyuanVideo, to the test—and it's surprisingly capable for being a "free" model.

Unlike the aforementioned models, HunyuanVideo's neural network weights are openly distributed, which means they can be run locally under the right circumstances (people have already demonstrated it on a consumer 24 GB VRAM GPU) and it can be fine-tuned or used with LoRAs to teach it new concepts.

Notably, a few Chinese companies have been at the forefront of AI video for most of this year, and some experts speculate that the reason is less reticence to train on copyrighted materials, use images and names of famous celebrities, and incorporate some uncensored video sources. As we saw with Stable Diffusion 3's mangled release, including nudity or pornography in training data may allow these models achieve better results by providing more information about human bodies. HunyuanVideo notably allows uncensored outputs, so unlike the commercial video models out there, it can generate videos of anatomically realistic, nude humans.

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On Wednesday, a video from OpenAI's newly launched Sora AI video generator went viral on social media, featuring a gymnast who sprouts extra limbs and briefly loses her head during what appears to be an Olympic-style floor routine.

As it turns out, the nonsensical synthesis errors in the video—what we like to call "jabberwockies"—hint at technical details about how AI video generators work and how they might get better in the future.

But before we dig into the details, let's take a look at the video.

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On Monday, OpenAI released Sora Turbo, a new version of its text-to-video generation model, making it available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers through a dedicated website. The model generates videos up to 20 seconds long at resolutions reaching 1080 p from a text or image prompt.

Open AI announced that Sora would be available today for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and many parts of the world but is not yet available in Europe. As of early Monday afternoon, though, even existing Plus subscribers trying to use the tool are being presented with a message that "sign ups are temporarily unavailable" thanks to "heavy traffic."

Out of an abundance of caution, OpenAI is limiting Sora's ability to generate videos of people for the time being. At launch, uploads involving human subjects face restrictions while OpenAI refines its deepfake prevention systems. The platform also blocks content involving CSAM and sexual deepfakes. OpenAI says it maintains an active monitoring system and conducted testing to identify potential misuse scenarios before release.

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Last week, actor and director Ben Affleck shared his views on AI's role in filmmaking during the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit, arguing that AI models will transform visual effects but won't replace creative filmmaking anytime soon. A video clip of Affleck's opinion began circulating widely on social media not long after.

"Didn’t expect Ben Affleck to have the most articulate and realistic explanation where video models and Hollywood is going," wrote one X user.

In the clip, Affleck spoke of current AI models' abilities as imitators and conceptual translators—mimics that are typically better at translating one style into another instead of originating deeply creative material.

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