Stability AI: Enters the Video Generation Arena

AI startups that aren’t OpenAI are plugging away this week, it’d seem — sticking to their product roadmaps even as coverage of the chaos at OpenAI dominates the airwaves. Stability AI, which this afternoon announced Stable Video Diffusion, an AI model that generates videos by animating existing images. Based on Stability’s existing Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, Stable Video Diffusion is one of the few video-generating models available in open source — or commercially, for that matter. Stable Video Diffusion is currently in what Stability’s describing as a “research preview.” Those who wish to run the model must agree to certain terms of use, which outline the Stable Video Diffusion’s intended applications (e.g. “educational or creative tools,” “design and other artistic processes,” etc.) and non-intended ones (“factual or true representations of people or events”). Given how other such AI research previews — including Stability’s own — have gone historically, this writer wouldn’t be surprised to see the model begin to circulate the dark web in short order. Stable Video Diffusion comes in the form of two models, actually — SVD and SVD-XT. The first, SVD, transforms still images into 576×1024 videos in 14 frames. SVD-XT uses the same architecture, but ups the frames to 24. Though it could open Stability and Stable Video Diffusion’s users to legal and ethical challenges around usage rights. Time will tell. The models — both SVD and SVD-XT — generate fairly high-quality four-second clips. By that can help generate stable video for advertising, education, entertainment, and beyond. Stability recently raised $25 million through a convertible note, bringing its total raised to over $125 million. It was last valued at $1 billion. Stability hasn’t closed new funding at a higher valuation; the startup was last valued at $1 billion. Stability had suffered another blow recently with the departure of Ed Newton-Rex, who had been VP of audio at the startup for just over a year.