Runway To Fund Independent AI Movies

OpenAI is gearing up for a significant shift, with plans to restructure as a for-profit profit corporation and hand CEO Sam Altman a 7% equity stake—the primary time he’ll hold ownership in the corporate. The non-profit board, currently on top of things, will cut back to a minority stake, making OpenAI more palatable to investors and pushing its valuation toward $150 billion.

This restructuring comes on the heels of CTO Mira Murati’s sudden exit. Murati, alongside Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and research lead Barret Zoph, also recently stepped down, with their departures described as independent and amicable. Murati, who briefly served as interim CEO during last 12 months’s upheaval, cited a desire for private exploration.

These leadership changes follow earlier exits from co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, and the corporate is now focused on balancing its mission of constructing “secure” AGI inside a more profit-driven framework, just like those of Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI. Read more.

Runway has introduced the Hundred Film Fund, allocating $5 million in money and extra service credits to support as much as 100 movies that utilize its generative AI video technology. This initiative seeks to stimulate the emerging AI film ecosystem by providing grants for various formats, including features, shorts, documentaries, and music videos, with filmmakers eligible for financial backing and as much as $2 million in service credits, potentially increasing total funding to $10 million.

Runway’s Head of Creative, Jamie Umpherson, emphasized that every project will probably be evaluated based on its specific production needs. Notably, Runway won’t claim ownership over the movies but would require biweekly production updates.

In light of this, industry veteran Michael Black identified that casting a large net and funding quite a few projects could also be clever. He described the approach as “spray and pray,” suggesting that among the many 100 movies, not less than one or two might exhibit the potential of AI-generated video effectively. Read more.

OpenAI is taking strides to revamp its video AI, Sora, which made its debut in February, with a mission to crank out longer, higher-quality video clips with greater speed. The unique version garnered some unfavorable feedback, often taking on ten minutes per clip and battling stylistic coherence and accurate object representation. Filmmaker Patrick Cederberg, as an illustration, found himself churning out a whole bunch of clips before landing on a usable product, hindered by inconsistencies and physics errors.

To refine Sora, OpenAI is amassing tens of millions of hours of high-resolution video footage as training data, with the intent of reducing biases and reinforcing the model’s dependability. Because the video AI arena heats up—with latest contenders sprouting in China and innovations from Runway ML—Sora stays in research mode while OpenAI fine-tunes its release plans and works to trim production costs. Read more.

Meta has made a series of announcements at its Meta Connect event, showcasing an array of hardware and AI innovations. The brand new Quest 3S VR headset, priced at $299.99, retains many features of its predecessor, the Quest 3, while forgoing certain enhancements like depth sensing to accommodate a lower cost point. In augmented reality, Meta’s Orion glasses use Micro LED projectors to overlay digital information within the user’s field of view, offering interactive capabilities just like those present in the updated Ray-Ban smart glasses.

The newest Llama 3.2 AI model has also been introduced, featuring enhanced image processing abilities that bring it in step with competitor offerings. Additional updates include latest AI-generated content in users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds, alongside advancements in real-time translation and celebrity chatbots across Meta’s platforms. Read more.