Runway released its Gen-4 text-to-video AI model, a rival to OpenAI’s Sora that can do something Sora can’t.
I do not appreciate what OpenAI did with ChatGPT’s 4o image generation model’s AI safety features, but I certainly appreciate the massive advancements from OpenAI. Yes, the Studio Ghibli-esque images that are flooding social networks are annoying, as are ChatGPT deepfakes featuring celebrities. But, again, OpenAI has achieved something amazing here.
The ease of use of 4o image generation essentially puts a sophisticated Photoshop tool in your pocket. You don’t even have to know how to use Photoshop, I mentioned the product because of what the word means or used to mean. You simply have to tell the AI what you want, and ChatGPT will deliver it.
I didn’t think my mind could be blown twice in the span of a few weeks, but that’s what Runway achieved with the new Gen-4 text/image-to-video model. The AI startup practically competes directly against OpenAI’s Sora and similar AI tools that let you create videos just as easily as you create images.
However, Runway Gen-4 does something others failed to achieve. The company came up with a model that brings consistency to AI video generation, which is one problem to fix in this particular sub-field of genAI programs.
To make videos with AI that are worth something, AI needs to be able to support character and scene consistency. That’s something Runway Gen-4 can offer, and the results are mind-blowing.
Making movies has evolved greatly in recent years, but one thing hasn’t changed. Any story you might tell through this medium has the same characters. They appear in various scenes, wear different outfits, and perform different tasks while delivering all sorts of lines.
Think of it like this: If you have Robert Downey Jr. in a Marvel movie, you’ll always want to recognize it’s him, no matter how many distinct roles he’ll have to play in the MCU, what costumes he wears, and what accent he might use to talk.
That’s not what’s been happening with AI text-to-video generators. Or if it was, it wasn’t easy to pull off. We did see plenty of exciting AI-generated video creations where the AI was largely available to preserve the same character from one scene to the next. But you could still tell it was an AI character and character consistency wasn’t perfect.
Today we’re introducing Gen-4, our new series of state-of-the-art AI models for media generation and world consistency. Gen-4 is a significant step forward for fidelity, dynamic motion and controllability in generative media.
