How did we score last time round? Our four hot trends to watch out for in 2024 included what we called customized chatbots--interactive helper apps powered by multimodal large language models (check: we didn't know it yet, but we were talking about what everyone now calls agents, the hottest thing in AI right now); generative video (check: few technologies have improved so fast in the last 12 months, with OpenAI and Google DeepMind releasing their flagship video generation models, Sora and Veo, within a week of each other this December); and more general-purpose robots that can do a wider range of tasks (check: the payoffs from large language models continue to trickle down to other parts of the tech industry, and robotics is top of the list). We also said that AI-generated election disinformation would be everywhere, but here--happily--we got it wrong. There were many things to wring our hands over this year, but political deepfakes were thin on the ground. We're going to ignore the obvious here: You can bet that agents and smaller, more efficient, language models will continue to shape the industry.

Fast-forward 18 months, and the best of Sora's high-definition, photorealistic output is so stunning that some breathless observers are predicting the death of Hollywood. Runway's latest models can produce short clips that rival those made by blockbuster animation studios. Midjourney and Stability AI, the firms behind two of the most popular text-to-image models, are now working on video as well. A number of companies are racing to make a business on the back of these breakthroughs. Most are figuring out what that business is as they go.

Stable Diffusion's generative art can now be animated, developer Stability AI announced. The company has released a new product called Stable Video Diffusion into a research preview, allowing users to create video from a single image. "This state-of-the-art generative AI video model represents a significant step in our journey toward creating models for everyone of every type," the company wrote. The new tool has been released in the form of two image-to-video models, each capable of generating 14 to 25 frames long at speeds between 3 and 30 frames per second at 576 1024 resolution. "At the time of release in their foundational form, through external evaluation, we have found these models surpass the leading closed models in user preference studies," the company said, comparing it to text-to-video platforms Runway and Pika Labs. Stable Video Diffusion is available only for research purposes at this point, not real-world or commercial applications.

Artificial intelligence is getting better and better at creating generative images, and now scientists are working at generative video. The idea is that simply by typing out a phrase, artificial intelligence could create a video of that scene. Scientists at Duke and Princeton have created a working model. "Video generation is intimately related to video prediction," the authors say in their new paper. Video prediction, in which A.I attempts to predict what actions come next in a video, has long been a goal for researchers.