alt Hacker NewsInteresting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation.
Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
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Sora was a social network type thing. Google sells their models on a PAYG basis - and makes money off them. Nano Banana alone has changed advertising 2D mockups and Photoshop like tasks forever. Notice how GPT image 2 is now available also on a PAYG basis.
I work in advertising and some days I spent a lot of money using these models. The amount and rapidity of prototyping using them has changed everything about advertising pre production.
YouTube. And video ads.
Previously when making video ads you'd need to actually create the video. Actors, cameramen, editors - you name it. Now a new video ads is just a prompt away, directly inside the ad-spend web UI too no doubt.
People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic, but I am not so sure...
10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.
They're main edge has been multimodal. I think they're still the best overall on multimodal? If I were them I would try to be the best at at least something.
I never personally got the least bit excited about Sora or nanobanana or whatever video/audio generation thing. But I guess I'm just not their customer. I do love the read-side of it though.
This is paid API access only. They are here to make money not to position themselves for an IPO. Not a value judgement only an observation.
Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data
Google has always been committed to multimodal.
And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora
And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI.
Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model.
OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.