When OpenAI unveiled Sora in February, it came as a surprise. While we’d seen the advancement of image generation tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, we hadn’t expected high-quality video generation solutions to emerge so soon.
At the time, many believed that OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, was leading the way in AI video generation by a large margin. After all, just like it had done with ChatGPT, the company had showcased cutting-edge technology at a level never seen before. However, in the past few months, the landscape has changed significantly.
Runway Gen-3 Alpha and the Sora Competition
It seems that OpenAI is no longer the only player in town. Within months, several new tools have emerged to directly compete with Sora, such as the U.S.-based Dream Machine, as well as Vidu and Kling AI from China. And on Monday, the new Gen-3 Alpha joined the competition.
Gen-3 Alpha is the newest model from the well-known New York AI company Runway, which released its Gen-1 and Gen-2 last year. This is the first in a series of models trained on a new multimodal infrastructure, and it boasts many new features.
Unlike Runway’s previous machine learning products, Gen-3 Alpha promises improvements in three key areas. First, according to the company, it’ll offer higher image quality with visual representations that capture abstract or realistic tones at an improved level of fidelity.
The company also promises that its new model is a leap forward in terms of consistency. This is important for professional use where the goal is to produce consistent results, so it’s crucial that the model doesn’t produce images that are significantly different from each other.
Another important aspect is movement. Creators usually aim for a balance in movement, given that too little can lead to unwanted patterns in the video, and too much can increase the risk. In any case, it seems that Runway is addressing this issue.
The model will be available soon for Runway subscribers and offer advanced controls for scene generation, such as Motion Brush, Advanced Camera Controls, and Director Mode. For its part, OpenAI hasn’t specified a release date for Sora, only saying that it’ll arrive “this year.”
Image | Runway
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