Startup releases AI system for generating videos from text

Runway, the startup that co-created the popular Stable Diffusion AI image generator, has released an AI model that takes any text description – such as “turtles flying in the sky” – and generates three seconds of matching video footage.

Citing safety and business reasons, Runway is not releasing the model widely to start, nor will it be open-sourced like Stable Diffusion. The text-to-video model, dubbed Gen-2, will initially be available on Discord via a waitlist on the Runway website.

Using AI to generate videos from text inputs is not new. Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) and Google (GOOGL.O) both released research papers on text-to-video AI models late last year. However, the difference is that Runway’s text-to-video AI model is being made available to the general public, said Cristobal Valenzuela, Runway’s chief executive.

Runway hopes that creatives and filmmakers will use the product, Valenzuela said. Reuters