The Download: text-to-video AI, and China's big methanol bet

What's happened: Meta has unveiled an AI system that generates short videos based on text prompts. Make-A-Video lets you type in a string of words, like "A dog wearing a superhero outfit with a red cape flying through the sky," and then generates a five-second clip that, while pretty accurate, has the aesthetics of a trippy old home video. How it works: Meta combined data from three open-source image and video data sets to train its model. Standard text-image data sets of labeled still images helped the AI learn what objects are called and what they look like. And a database of videos helped it learn how those objects are supposed to move in the world. Why it matters: Although the effect is rather crude, the system offers an early glimpse of what's coming next for generative artificial intelligence, and it is the next obvious step from the text-to-image AI systems that have caused huge excitement this year.