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BRIA. Raising $s. Congratulations to BRIA AI, last year's Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner, which announced it has raised $24M in a Series A! BRIA licenses more than a billion images from 18 stock providers for its GenAI creation platform. It plans to use the money to expand globally and build out text-to-video generation capabilities.
Analogous to Spotify, BRIA charges its customers for access to the platform and shares revenue with the content owners. Each time BRIA generates an image, it displays the original licensed images that contributed data toward that output and accounts for how much came from each.
Google Gemini. Generating AI images is a hornet’s nest. After Google has previously been burned by its AI generating tools’ biases (classifying Black men as gorillas, for instance), the company has now paused its Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after user complaints of historical inaccuracies and overly “sensitive” responses.
Apparently, Gemini refused to generate images for prompts like “show me images of only women” or “show me images of only men,” asserting such images could “contribute to the exclusion and marginalization of other genders.” Gemini was also loath to generate images of people identified solely by their race — e.g. “white people” or “black people” — out of ostensible concern for “reducing individuals to their physical characteristics.”
Open AI. AI video generation that knocks your socks off. It has been more than a week now but the tech world is still swooning over the quality of AI-generated video examples generated with Sora, OpenAI’s new AI-generated video model. How about this prompt that generated a gorgeous video that you can view here? “Beautiful, snowy Tokyo city is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street, following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes.”
Sora is powered by a version of the diffusion model used by OpenAI’s Dalle-3 image generator as well as the transformer-based engine of GPT-4. But what makes Sora unique is its understanding of time and physics, which enables it to create not only more coherent videos than previous video generators, but also 3D worlds.
What’s next? Reportedly, the ability to generate videos from a single image or a sequence of frames.
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