Lots of activity around Wan lately. It’s nice to see flexible open models make a strong showing against the massively funded closed competitors like OpenAI and Runway.
OpenAI wowed the world with a video model that was also a script writing, editing, dubbing, foley, and music model.
Kling still has the best proprietary video model, but Sora 2 is so smart that you don't need to edit anything if your target is social.
I don't see how Runway, Pika, or the rest of the purely foundation video model startups survive against the giants and the incredible open source Chinese models. They've got to be sweating bullets right now.
Everyone's also sleeping on xAI's high quality and insanely fast video model (10 second generations) that they're giving away completely for free without watermarks.
Heh, I used to work for Nokia's Ovi - basically, gsuite for nokia phones (my group did map search) - the official explanation was "Ovi is Finnish for Door", the internal joke was "Ovi is Hungarian for Kindergarten". I couldn't find any backstory about the name here, though.
It's funny you mention this, I was just thinking this other day we may eventually be in a future where a group hangout party could look like this:
1. Goes to friends' place
2. Usual drinks, whatever gets you going activity
3. Each person writes a prompt
4. Chain them together
5. Watch the resulting movie together
If they're actually hosting it and providing a service, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Ovi's Apache license allows commercial use. They would only be infringing on the license by not publishing it and the original copyright, and would be morally bankrupt by not disclosing the original project and passing it off as their own.
But I also suspect that most of these are indeed SEO scammers, that there's no actual service, and that all payments are pocketed. It might take a few days for the scam to be reported and the site taken down, but it's likely enough to get a few hundred bucks out of it. They'll never be pursued because of where they live, and they can have many of these up in no time, thanks to AI, as you say.
What a sad state of affairs that no "AI" company or government is taking seriously.
mindblowing - but still in the uncanny valley. and I guess it's cute that many of the characters live in a world where AI has caused an apocolypse, but is that really the message they want to lead with?
The limits of CGI have gotten so good that if you are noticing the CGI, it's b/c someone skimped on the budget for the particular movie where you saw the uncanny valley.
(Of course, excluding the obvious "that guy just knocked down a building!" CGI)
When the printing press was invented, people didn’t start creating best-selling hits.
Humans have always taken it upon ourselves to define what we consider success. Cheap things will always remain cheap…
> How long until we see blockbuster movies produced by a guy in his basement for <$1000?
Probably never. If AI is good enough to cover all the skills needed to do what would currently make a blockbuster movie for less than $1000, the demand for movies will be small enough relative to supply that there will be no such thing as a “blockbuster movie”
I don't believe that consequence. It's never been easier for someone at home to make short videos - see TikTok and YouTube. In fact most people consume most content on those platforms. Yet there's still high demand for movies and blockbuster movies still happen (usually driven by hype on the aforementioned platforms).
On the other hand, I think the quality of movies and expectations will be a lot higher.
> It's never been easier for someone at home to make short videos - see TikTok and YouTube. In fact most people consume most content on those platforms. Yet there's still high demand for movies and blockbuster movies still happen
This is obviously true, but I don't see how it relates to the question being discussed. "Short videos" and "blockbuster movies" are clearly widely separated categories, despite both being audiovisual content of some kind.
Never. I've seen people instantly go from liking a static image to disliking it upon learning it was AI generated. The same applies to other kinds of media. No matter how "good" it is, knowing that it was created by an unfeeling algorithm ruins it for most people.
I read a while ago that big scientific ideas take about 50 years to be accepted. Which basically means they are never accepted. The people who disagree just get old and die.
Younger generation who grow up with AI will just think it’s normal, like we think being connected to the internet via a rectangle you keep in your pocket is normal.
I’d say it’s the other way around - it took 50 years for EVEN A SCIENTIFIC IDEA - with proof to be accepted. That should have happened super quick. But it didn’t.
My point is that you and I will probably never accept it - but our kids will never even think it’s weird in the first place.
That's not the other way around, that's my point. A scientific idea will eventually be accepted because its objective truth makes it inevitable in spite of resistance. Wide acceptance of AI movies is no more inevitable than wide acceptance of bellbottom jeans--it's simply a matter of like or dislike. From what I've seen, people have a strong aversion to it and no particular reason to overcome that aversion.
So far not one commenter in this thread has articulated why AI movies are inevitable.
New things will be possible that aren’t today. You’ll be able to pick the stars in your movie. The home base can be your childhood home. Your unrequited love can be virtually fulfilled. Etc etc.
Yes, and none of these hyperpersonal movies will be a blockbuster; they'll be lucky to have audiences requiring the fingers of more than one hand to count, because everyone will have their own hyperpersonal preferences.
A "blockbuster movie" implies commercial use. I think actual stars would object to their likeness being used in that way.
If you're talking about people firing up the ol' 5090 to make a "movie" about their favorite streamer falling madly in love with them for, ahem, personal use, I have no doubt that people will do that. And I will do everything in my power to avoid associating with such brain-rotted cretins.
Most people would use these tools for personal use, if nothing else. Seeing a celebrity, themselves, their friends, etc., act out any scenario they can think of is quite an appealing proposition. And porn, of course, for better or worse.
In the long-term, this has the potential to significantly change how media is created and consumed. Feature films produced by large studios will undoubtedly continue to exist, and they will also leverage the technology, but it's not difficult to imagine a new branch of personalized media becoming popular. The tools are practically already there; they just need to become more accessible, and slightly better.
People will like them when they’re good content. Right now we’re stuck in the in between where it’s kind of all or nothing ai, but it will get grayer when the feedback loops are tighter and building ai movies is more interactive. Same thing with any special effects really
I think AI has its place in special effects, but "making a blockbuster movie for $1000" requires replacing all the actors, music, cinematography, everything that makes a movie "art" except maybe the plot. And I have never seen anyone respond well to AI "art" of any form. I've seen some fairly passable (if a bit boring) AI music passed around on Reddit and it was universally met with disgust simply because it was AI.
Photos, movies, animation, recorded music, computer games, CGI props in movies, CGI characters in movies were all denounced as "not real art", until good counter-examples appeared.
AI is but a tool; if there is an artist using them, real art can be created, as with any other tool.
Photos initially captured poorly but were still more affordable than paying a master painter, animation give life to static images, recordings allow listeners to play music without the need to attend, CGI makes for cheaper or infeasible reproductions. For all the cases where technology was adopted, it improved over what we had.
So far, Ai generated videos, and arguably photos seem to only please wishful thinkers, or untalented artists dreaming to make it.
I don't imply the tech will never get to the tipping point, but it so far provides so little value we are either many years to go, or it just won't happen.
Let's be an optimist. It will eventually get there. I doubt for any of parallels you made billions of people hammered daily by overblown posts about the upcoming revolution.
The reasons for critiques have a lot to do with promotion fatigue. Hyperboles eventually exhaust their impact.
I fully expect that we will see an AI video project that gets to Skibidi Toilet levels of cultural reach within the next two years, but 'blockbluster' implies a level of financial success that is much harder to predict.
Based on that trailer we're a long, long way away. Ignoring the unsettling facial expressions of the human characters, there is zero visual (or audio) cohesion between the scenes. A full movie of such incoherent visuals would be a difficult watch.
It depends on what you mean by "blockbuster movie", as even those can have awful visual effects. But a short film released a few months ago made entirely with video generation tools was surprisingly decent[1]. It still requires a talented "director" to have the right vision to guide the project, but the tools are there.
Before we see this and higher level of quality accessible to enthusiasts, we'll see these tools adopted by mainstream studios first, which is starting to happen.
I'm a firm "AI" skeptic, but if this technology has revolutionized anything, it has been image generation. A few years ago it was science fiction to have the quality of upscaling we take for granted today. I reckon the same will happen with video generation as well a few years from now. Unlike "ASI" and "AGI", these improvements are achievable with better engineering, and don't necessarily require a breakthrough.
I've yet to see continuity working. Small clips is one thing. To have the same character, wearing the same clothes, revisit environments, with the same lighting and post processing is very different.
That and control, there's an enormous difference between letting a model just YOLO a prompt, filling in 95% of the details with vaguely plausible whatever, and getting a model to execute on a meticulously planned out shot with every last detail in order.
I don't know how long it will take for photorealistic movies but I'm looking forward to that Hyperion animated movie I'd make myself because nobody wants or is able to.
honestly i think there is a future in this.. "hey AI model, generate a movie from this book" may indeed be better than letting a director mangle it into something meant to sell tickets. most book -> movie adaptations are not setting a high bar
Soon as the video models can keep characters consistent across scenes. It could take months of prompting to get each scene, but regular movies have long shooting timelines too. If we ever get to instant movie, thought to scene, then movies will die since people will just daydream through the AI.
I can see soap-opera-style, video-manga becoming a thing, where you get 5x20 minute episodes a week, and an ai-generated 30 min super cut of the week's "events" every saturday. What if DragonBallZ, but new episodes drop every morning before your morning commute? And for $30 a month you can do a choose your own adventure where at the end of each episode, the story splits off and you get an alternate history version, but conveniently rejoins the main story by the end of the week.
Three years ago we had a live streaming autogen-seinfeld twitch stream; some kind of coherent story telling via AI doesn't seem beyond reach today, the tools just haven't fully matured yet.
Seems like the video model is based on Wan2.2.
Lots of activity around Wan lately. It’s nice to see flexible open models make a strong showing against the massively funded closed competitors like OpenAI and Runway.
Discussed here:
Wan – Open-source alternative to VEO 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44928997 - Aug 2025 (38 comments)
And Google.
OpenAI wowed the world with a video model that was also a script writing, editing, dubbing, foley, and music model.
Kling still has the best proprietary video model, but Sora 2 is so smart that you don't need to edit anything if your target is social.
I don't see how Runway, Pika, or the rest of the purely foundation video model startups survive against the giants and the incredible open source Chinese models. They've got to be sweating bullets right now.
Everyone's also sleeping on xAI's high quality and insanely fast video model (10 second generations) that they're giving away completely for free without watermarks.
[dead]
Heh, I used to work for Nokia's Ovi - basically, gsuite for nokia phones (my group did map search) - the official explanation was "Ovi is Finnish for Door", the internal joke was "Ovi is Hungarian for Kindergarten". I couldn't find any backstory about the name here, though.
[dead]
At this rate, in a few months we will have probably some high quality shorts entirely generated by this.
It's funny you mention this, I was just thinking this other day we may eventually be in a future where a group hangout party could look like this:
1. Goes to friends' place 2. Usual drinks, whatever gets you going activity 3. Each person writes a prompt 4. Chain them together 5. Watch the resulting movie together
That sounds hilarious and I can't wait to try
Lazyweb: Are these related? If so, how?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603435
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652726
When a new open weights AI model comes out, opportunists register a domain using its name and start hosting it hoping to make a buck with SEO.
Easier than ever now, as AI-assisted coding tools will build you that generic landing page and basic UI.
If they're actually hosting it and providing a service, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Ovi's Apache license allows commercial use. They would only be infringing on the license by not publishing it and the original copyright, and would be morally bankrupt by not disclosing the original project and passing it off as their own.
But I also suspect that most of these are indeed SEO scammers, that there's no actual service, and that all payments are pocketed. It might take a few days for the scam to be reported and the site taken down, but it's likely enough to get a few hundred bucks out of it. They'll never be pursued because of where they live, and they can have many of these up in no time, thanks to AI, as you say.
What a sad state of affairs that no "AI" company or government is taking seriously.
mindblowing - but still in the uncanny valley. and I guess it's cute that many of the characters live in a world where AI has caused an apocolypse, but is that really the message they want to lead with?
> but still in the uncanny valley
that and the guitar player behind the singer in the concert example has three arms :)
To be fair, a lot of movies in theaters have uncanny valleys. A lot of CGI feels that way to me.
The limits of CGI have gotten so good that if you are noticing the CGI, it's b/c someone skimped on the budget for the particular movie where you saw the uncanny valley.
(Of course, excluding the obvious "that guy just knocked down a building!" CGI)
Yeah that's the thing, with good execution of a plausible effect you don't even realize you're looking at CGI. It's the toupée fallacy.
Obligatory Jonas Ussing plug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo&list=PLgdTaHO8FL...
Kinda terrifying. And it can run in 32GB of VRAM? Anyone with a 5090 can start spewing out believable fake videos.
Yeah and even with the server it’s really cheap - things like omnihuman are I think better but MUCH more expensive to run
The other option is to rent a 5090 in the cloud. Probably less than 0.50 per hour at most providers.
How long until we see blockbuster movies produced by a guy in his basement for <$1000?
When the printing press was invented, people didn’t start creating best-selling hits. Humans have always taken it upon ourselves to define what we consider success. Cheap things will always remain cheap…
> How long until we see blockbuster movies produced by a guy in his basement for <$1000?
Probably never. If AI is good enough to cover all the skills needed to do what would currently make a blockbuster movie for less than $1000, the demand for movies will be small enough relative to supply that there will be no such thing as a “blockbuster movie”
I don't believe that consequence. It's never been easier for someone at home to make short videos - see TikTok and YouTube. In fact most people consume most content on those platforms. Yet there's still high demand for movies and blockbuster movies still happen (usually driven by hype on the aforementioned platforms).
On the other hand, I think the quality of movies and expectations will be a lot higher.
> It's never been easier for someone at home to make short videos - see TikTok and YouTube. In fact most people consume most content on those platforms. Yet there's still high demand for movies and blockbuster movies still happen
This is obviously true, but I don't see how it relates to the question being discussed. "Short videos" and "blockbuster movies" are clearly widely separated categories, despite both being audiovisual content of some kind.
Never. I've seen people instantly go from liking a static image to disliking it upon learning it was AI generated. The same applies to other kinds of media. No matter how "good" it is, knowing that it was created by an unfeeling algorithm ruins it for most people.
I read a while ago that big scientific ideas take about 50 years to be accepted. Which basically means they are never accepted. The people who disagree just get old and die.
Younger generation who grow up with AI will just think it’s normal, like we think being connected to the internet via a rectangle you keep in your pocket is normal.
Scientific ideas have the benefit of being objectively true.
AI movies are not a "scientific idea". Liking them is a matter of taste, and there are plenty of things that never catch on.
I’d say it’s the other way around - it took 50 years for EVEN A SCIENTIFIC IDEA - with proof to be accepted. That should have happened super quick. But it didn’t.
My point is that you and I will probably never accept it - but our kids will never even think it’s weird in the first place.
That's not the other way around, that's my point. A scientific idea will eventually be accepted because its objective truth makes it inevitable in spite of resistance. Wide acceptance of AI movies is no more inevitable than wide acceptance of bellbottom jeans--it's simply a matter of like or dislike. From what I've seen, people have a strong aversion to it and no particular reason to overcome that aversion.
So far not one commenter in this thread has articulated why AI movies are inevitable.
New things will be possible that aren’t today. You’ll be able to pick the stars in your movie. The home base can be your childhood home. Your unrequited love can be virtually fulfilled. Etc etc.
Yes, and none of these hyperpersonal movies will be a blockbuster; they'll be lucky to have audiences requiring the fingers of more than one hand to count, because everyone will have their own hyperpersonal preferences.
A good thing, since most such movies will be made to keep one hand occupied.
A "blockbuster movie" implies commercial use. I think actual stars would object to their likeness being used in that way.
If you're talking about people firing up the ol' 5090 to make a "movie" about their favorite streamer falling madly in love with them for, ahem, personal use, I have no doubt that people will do that. And I will do everything in my power to avoid associating with such brain-rotted cretins.
This is defo true until the moment it gets so good people can't tell.
Gonna be pretty hard to pass off a whole movie as real when none of the "actors" exist.
"Never" is quite short-sighted.
Most people would use these tools for personal use, if nothing else. Seeing a celebrity, themselves, their friends, etc., act out any scenario they can think of is quite an appealing proposition. And porn, of course, for better or worse.
In the long-term, this has the potential to significantly change how media is created and consumed. Feature films produced by large studios will undoubtedly continue to exist, and they will also leverage the technology, but it's not difficult to imagine a new branch of personalized media becoming popular. The tools are practically already there; they just need to become more accessible, and slightly better.
Man, am I ever getting tired of replying to the same poorly thought out points over and over again.
> Most people would use these tools for personal use
Not what we're talking about. Not "personalized media", not large studios "leveraging the technology", not "visual effects".
See: "blockbuster movies produced by a guy in his basement for <$1000".
Never is a long time. The resistance will erode.
"People will like AI movies because it's inevitable"
Circular reasoning. If you can't answer WHY people should come to like AI movies, then you have nothing to say.
People will like them when they’re good content. Right now we’re stuck in the in between where it’s kind of all or nothing ai, but it will get grayer when the feedback loops are tighter and building ai movies is more interactive. Same thing with any special effects really
I think AI has its place in special effects, but "making a blockbuster movie for $1000" requires replacing all the actors, music, cinematography, everything that makes a movie "art" except maybe the plot. And I have never seen anyone respond well to AI "art" of any form. I've seen some fairly passable (if a bit boring) AI music passed around on Reddit and it was universally met with disgust simply because it was AI.
As with many things of human ideation and creation: If they can't understand distribution, a long time.
Besides people with weird fetishes, who actually enjoys looking at AI "art"?
I rather enjoyed some of these
https://reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1lq299r/postscarci...
https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1o6ickx/dreaming_on...
https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1n6mzig/how_to_buil...
https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1nwdjdn/the_perfect_bo...
https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1m8a9wz/pinkington_rop...
https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1n52kut/derek_the_agin...
https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1muwyah/still_here_...
https://reddit.com/r/DefendingAIArt/comments/1mttoi4/my_not_...
I enjoyed just about everything in here: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-ton-of-ai-images-ive-mad...
Photos, movies, animation, recorded music, computer games, CGI props in movies, CGI characters in movies were all denounced as "not real art", until good counter-examples appeared.
AI is but a tool; if there is an artist using them, real art can be created, as with any other tool.
Photos initially captured poorly but were still more affordable than paying a master painter, animation give life to static images, recordings allow listeners to play music without the need to attend, CGI makes for cheaper or infeasible reproductions. For all the cases where technology was adopted, it improved over what we had.
So far, Ai generated videos, and arguably photos seem to only please wishful thinkers, or untalented artists dreaming to make it.
I don't imply the tech will never get to the tipping point, but it so far provides so little value we are either many years to go, or it just won't happen.
Let's be an optimist. It will eventually get there. I doubt for any of parallels you made billions of people hammered daily by overblown posts about the upcoming revolution.
The reasons for critiques have a lot to do with promotion fatigue. Hyperboles eventually exhaust their impact.
I think "blockbuster movie" is a moving target, so it's a bit hard to know
It's a relatively well defined measure of success though: a movie which is popular and high-grossing.
Unless marketing and the guy's food doesn't count, never. But a "runaway hit for almost nothing"? Not unheard of.
I fully expect that we will see an AI video project that gets to Skibidi Toilet levels of cultural reach within the next two years, but 'blockbluster' implies a level of financial success that is much harder to predict.
Based on that trailer we're a long, long way away. Ignoring the unsettling facial expressions of the human characters, there is zero visual (or audio) cohesion between the scenes. A full movie of such incoherent visuals would be a difficult watch.
Probably will depend on how good the writing is.
We'll always be just a few years away.
The main constraint to good movies is good actors and good scripts. So presumably an AI would have to write well or perform well to do that.
It depends on what you mean by "blockbuster movie", as even those can have awful visual effects. But a short film released a few months ago made entirely with video generation tools was surprisingly decent[1]. It still requires a talented "director" to have the right vision to guide the project, but the tools are there.
Before we see this and higher level of quality accessible to enthusiasts, we'll see these tools adopted by mainstream studios first, which is starting to happen.
I'm a firm "AI" skeptic, but if this technology has revolutionized anything, it has been image generation. A few years ago it was science fiction to have the quality of upscaling we take for granted today. I reckon the same will happen with video generation as well a few years from now. Unlike "ASI" and "AGI", these improvements are achievable with better engineering, and don't necessarily require a breakthrough.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564697
I've yet to see continuity working. Small clips is one thing. To have the same character, wearing the same clothes, revisit environments, with the same lighting and post processing is very different.
I think we'll see AGI first.
That and control, there's an enormous difference between letting a model just YOLO a prompt, filling in 95% of the details with vaguely plausible whatever, and getting a model to execute on a meticulously planned out shot with every last detail in order.
I don't know how long it will take for photorealistic movies but I'm looking forward to that Hyperion animated movie I'd make myself because nobody wants or is able to.
honestly i think there is a future in this.. "hey AI model, generate a movie from this book" may indeed be better than letting a director mangle it into something meant to sell tickets. most book -> movie adaptations are not setting a high bar
Soon as the video models can keep characters consistent across scenes. It could take months of prompting to get each scene, but regular movies have long shooting timelines too. If we ever get to instant movie, thought to scene, then movies will die since people will just daydream through the AI.
I can see soap-opera-style, video-manga becoming a thing, where you get 5x20 minute episodes a week, and an ai-generated 30 min super cut of the week's "events" every saturday. What if DragonBallZ, but new episodes drop every morning before your morning commute? And for $30 a month you can do a choose your own adventure where at the end of each episode, the story splits off and you get an alternate history version, but conveniently rejoins the main story by the end of the week.
Three years ago we had a live streaming autogen-seinfeld twitch stream; some kind of coherent story telling via AI doesn't seem beyond reach today, the tools just haven't fully matured yet.
People can daydream for free now.
[dead]
[dead]