What is this?
AI video generation turns text or images into moving pictures. In three years it went from nightmarish 2-second clips to minute-long scenes with native sound, consistent characters and camera control. It is reshaping advertising, film previsualization and social media. It also fuels the deepfake debate.
Key tools & players
- FLUX 3 Video (Black Forest Labs) — 20-second clips with dialogue and effects in one pass
- Veo (Google DeepMind) — generation with native audio
- Runway — the filmmaker's suite, control-focused
- Kling (Kuaishou) — China's strongest, widely used globally
- Pika, Luma, Hailuo — fast, accessible alternatives
Milestones
- 2023 — Runway Gen-2 and Pika: first usable text-to-video
- Feb 2024 — Sora's reveal stuns the industry: minute-long coherent scenes
- 2024 — Kling and Veo answer; realistic physics improves rapidly
- 2025 — Veo 3 generates video with sound; Sora launches as a social app; AI ads air on TV
- 2026 — Character consistency and multi-shot storytelling become the frontier
- Jul 2026 — MiniMax H3: 2K clips with voice, effects and music generated together as native stereo; open weights promised
- Aug 2026 — H3 delivers open weights and becomes the first open model to lead a major video ranking
- Aug 2026 — FLUX 3 Video goes generally available: 20-second clips with dialogue, effects and ambience made in one pass
- Aug 2026 — Alibaba's Wan 3.0 opens public beta: one model turns documents and webpages into 30-second videos with sound
- Sep 2026 — OpenAI retires Sora: the app closed in April, the API on 24 September, with no replacement named (our coverage)
Mini glossary
- Diffusion: technique that generates images/video by refining noise step by step
- World model: an AI's internal sense of how objects and physics behave
- Native audio: sound generated together with the video, not added later