NVIDIA-backed Luma AI reaches a $4 billion valuation after securing $900 million in Series C funding led by Saudi-owned Humain, and is now expanding to London with 200 new hires as its Ray3 world model reportedly outperforms OpenAI's Sora and rivals Google's Veo 3.
China's Kling AI, a Kuaishou spinoff valued at $15 billion, raises $2 billion in venture capital and reports explosive 300% year-over-year revenue growth, hitting $500 million in annual recurring revenue as the global AI video race intensifies.
Google launches Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash, delivering lightning-fast, low-cost AI image and video generation for developers and consumers, with images produced in just 4 seconds and video output available at $0.10 per second.
Google's Gemini Omni Flash leads a fiercely competitive Text-to-Video AI leaderboard with a top score of 1527, but Chinese tech giants ByteDance and Alibaba are closing the gap fast, claiming second and third place respectively among 41 competing models.
Google DeepMind invests $75 million in indie film studio A24 in a landmark partnership to develop AI filmmaking tools, as Hollywood's AI race intensifies with Netflix and Amazon also making major moves to integrate artificial intelligence into film production.
Alibaba's HappyHorse 1.1 rockets to No. 2 globally in AI video, Reflection AI locks a $6.3B SpaceX compute deal for open-weight models, and Anthropic gets caught in a regulatory trap after its own risk warnings trigger a U.S. export ban on its latest AI models.
Alibaba Cloud surges to No. 2 globally in AI video generation with its newly launched HappyHorse 1.1 model, capitalizing on a rapidly contracting market as OpenAI shuts down Sora and ByteDance freezes its rival product, though geopolitical tensions and a Pentagon military designation threaten to limit Western enterprise adoption.
Google is investing $75 million in acclaimed studio A24 to develop AI-powered filmmaking tools through a partnership with Google DeepMind, marking a major push into Hollywood as tech giants race to reshape how films are created.
Google DeepMind and A24 are joining forces in a groundbreaking research partnership that embeds cutting-edge AI directly into the filmmaking process, with Google also making a financial investment in the acclaimed studio.
Runway's AI Film Festival in Santa Monica puts generative AI filmmaking in the spotlight, showcasing ten short films that blend 4K AI-generated shots with traditional footage, as Hollywood accelerates its embrace of the technology through major studio deals and high-profile advisers like Martin Scorsese, even amid growing pushback from creatives …