Category
55 entries
OpenAI shuts down the Sora app on April 26, 2026; the Sora 2 API will be turned off September 24. Operating costs estimated around $1M/day, compute shifting to ChatGPT/GPT-5.5 and core enterprise.
Google releases Nano Banana 2 (aka Gemini 3.1 Flash Image): much better text rendering, consistency for up to 5 characters and 14 objects, default for image generation in Gemini app, Flow, Lens, and Search AI Mode.
Google releases Veo 3.1 and Veo 3.1 Lite: video generation with "ingredients" (multiple reference images for character/scene consistency), 1080p/4K output, vertical format for Shorts. Veo 3.1 Lite is the cost-effective variant.
Runway ships Gen-4: 5-10s video generation with character, object, and environment consistency across clips. Solves the key problem for AI short-film production: the character stays itself, scene after scene.
At Google I/O 2025, DeepMind unveils Veo 3 (video gen with native audio, dialogue, effects), Imagen 4 (more detailed images), and Flow (AI video tool for creators).
MiniMax launches Hailuo Video with 6-second 1080p generation featuring realistic motion photography and natural camera shake, results comparable to Veo 2 in public tests.
Alibaba extends WanVideo 2.1 with structured video editing capabilities: video inpainting, object removal, and style transfer with temporal coherence between consecutive frames.
Black Forest Labs ships FLUX1.1 [pro] Ultra: native 4 megapixels (2K+), 10s latency, and a 'Raw' mode that produces less 'AI-looking' results closer to real photography.
Midjourney launches v7 with new personalization tokens, draft mode for rapid iteration, and improved style consistency across different prompts. Photorealism at the highest level for the service.
Alibaba releases WanVideo 2.1, a 14B open-source model for T2V and I2V with quality competitive with Sora and drastically lower operating cost, available on HuggingFace.
Tencent releases full weights of Hunyuan Video 13B: text-to-video model at 720p, 5-second clips, competitive with Sora and Kling. The most capable open-source video model at release. Enables high-quality self-hosted video generation for the first time.
Alibaba/Wanx releases Wan 2.1 on Hugging Face: 14 billion parameters, 720p video up to 81 frames, surpassing all previous open source video models in quality and length.
Google DeepMind announces Veo 2, a text-to-video model with up to 4K output and 2-minute clips, and updates Imagen 3 — released on VideoFX/ImageFX and later in the Gemini app stack.
OpenAI ships Sora Turbo to ChatGPT Plus/Pro users: videos up to 20s, 1080p, image-to-video, remix, storyboard. Faster, less faithful version than the February Sora demo.
Kuaishou updates Kling to 1.5: videos up to 3 minutes at 1080p, camera motion control, lip synchronization, and motion brush for guided animations.
Adobe launches the Firefly Video Model: text and image-to-video generation trained exclusively on licensed and public domain content. Integrated into Premiere Pro timeline. First enterprise video generator with full commercial IP indemnification.
Leonardo AI launches Phoenix, its internal model with advanced stylistic coherence, dynamic color grading, and automatic prompt upsampling for professional results from simple inputs.
Stability AI releases SD 3.5 Large (8B) and Large Turbo: improved prompt adherence and photorealism vs SD 3, 4-step inference for the Turbo variant. First fully open SD 3.x release under a new community license.
Pika launches version 2.0 with scene consistency across multiple clips, video inpainting, automatic SFX generated from video content, and audio synchronized to movements.
Black Forest Labs, founded by ex-Stability AI team, launches Flux 1.0 with flow matching architecture at 12 billion parameters, setting new open source standards on prompt adherence and visual quality.
Black Forest Labs launches FLUX.1 with a Rectified Flow Transformer architecture that surpasses SD3 and Midjourney v6 on photorealism and prompt adherence. The [dev] weights are released under Apache 2.0.
Zhipu AI releases CogVideoX 5B and 10B: open-source text-to-video model with 3D full attention architecture, 720p, 10-second clips with high motion coherence. First Chinese open-source video model competitive with commercial offerings. Weights on HuggingFace.
Runway launches Gen-3 Alpha with camera motion control via prompts, programmable temporality, and 10-second HD video with cinematic quality never seen before in public models.
Luma AI launches Dream Machine, a text-to-video model freely accessible via web (with a queue), 5-second 1280×720 clips — the consumer answer to Sora, still unreleased.
Microsoft releases Florence-2, a unified vision foundation model that handles captioning, object detection, segmentation, and OCR with a single prompt-based sequence-to-sequence architecture.
Kuaishou launches Kling AI, a video model capable of generating 1080p clips up to 2 minutes with coherent physics and motion, competitive with Sora in public demonstrations.
Ideogram 2.0 sets a new standard for text rendering in AI images: accurate multi-word text, logos, signs. Introduces magic prompt and realistic photography mode. Surpasses DALL-E 3 and Midjourney on typographic accuracy.
Stability AI announces SD3 with a Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture, text rendering competitive with Imagen 2 and DALL-E 3, and visual quality superior to SDXL.
Stability AI releases SVD 1.1 with multi-frame video generation from a single image, MotionID for motion intensity control, and open-source weights on HuggingFace.
ComfyUI surpasses 30,000 GitHub stars, establishing itself as the de facto interface for advanced Stable Diffusion workflows thanks to its visual node system and very active community.
OpenAI announces Sora, a text-to-video model producing 1080p clips up to 60 seconds with temporal consistency, plausible physics, and realistic camera moves. Limited release to red-teamers and selected artists.
Ideogram AI launches version 1.0 with text rendering superior to Midjourney and DALL-E 3, templates for design and poster creation, and a branding-oriented interface.
Ideogram launches stable version 1.0 with excellent text rendering, closing the historic weak point of all previous diffusion models in generating coherent text within images.
Pika Labs launches Pika 1.0: a consumer platform for video generation from text or image, region animation, and aspect ratio control. Reaches 500k Discord users. Funded by Khosla Ventures at $55M.
Tsinghua University publishes LCM: distillation of a diffusion model reducing sampling from 50 steps to 4 with minimal quality loss. LCM-LoRA makes any SD model 10x faster. First technique enabling real-time generation on consumer hardware.
LLaVA-1.5 combines CLIP ViT-L, a two-layer MLP projection, and Vicuna to surpass 11 multimodal benchmarks using only 1.2M fine-tuning examples.
OpenAI launches DALL-E 3 integrated into ChatGPT: dramatically improved prompt adherence over DALL-E 2, automatic caption synthesis for training, more readable text in images.
Adobe launches Firefly 1.0 GA, the first image generation model trained exclusively on licensed content, integrated into Photoshop as Generative Fill for commercially safe use.
Tencent AI Lab releases IP-Adapter, a lightweight adapter for Stable Diffusion that conditions generation on a reference image without retraining the base model.
Shanghai AI Lab publishes AnimateDiff: a plug-in motion module that adds temporal consistency to any existing SD checkpoint, turning every image-only model into a video generator without retraining it.
Stability ships SDXL 1.0 (3.5B base + 6.6B refiner), native 1024×1024 output, shorter prompts. Open source under commercial license, weights on HuggingFace.
Stability AI launches SDXL 0.9 beta with dual-encoder architecture and separate refiner model for photographic-quality 1024x1024 images.
Runway launches Gen-1: the first commercial model that applies a visual style from text or a reference image to an existing video, frame by frame. Precursor to the Gen-2/Gen-3 line.
Zhang et al. introduce ControlNet, an adapter adding pose, depth, and edge control to Stable Diffusion without modifying the base model weights.
Stability AI releases SD 2.0 with OpenCLIP replacing CLIP, native 768x768 resolution, a new depth2img model, and improved inpainting. A controversial release due to breaking compatibility with existing LoRAs and prompts.
Weizmann Institute publishes Textual Inversion: learning a new text token representing a custom concept from 3-5 images, without modifying model weights.
A week after Make-A-Video, Google Research unveils Imagen Video and, around the same time, Phenaki: two different approaches to text-to-video, with longer, more coherent clips.
Meta AI shows Make-A-Video, a system that generates short animated clips from a text description by reusing a pre-existing text-to-image model.
Google Research publishes DreamBooth: fine-tune a diffusion model on 3-5 images of a specific subject to reproduce it in any context or style. Foundation of all personalized AI image generation.
Stability AI publicly releases weights and code of a text-to-image latent diffusion model that runs on a consumer GPU. AI image generation leaves the cloud.
OpenAI opens DALL-E 2 in beta to over one million waitlist users, with a pay-per-image credit system. First large-scale consumer product for image generation.
Midjourney opens its public beta with a text-to-image model accessible via a Discord bot. Its strong aesthetic default and community turn image generation into a mass phenomenon.
Google Research unveils Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model that uses a frozen T5 text encoder and beats DALL-E 2 on benchmarks for photorealistic fidelity.
OpenAI announces DALL·E 2, a diffusion-based text-to-image model producing photorealistic 1024×1024 images. Initially waitlist-only, public access in July.
OpenAI publishes GLIDE, a text-to-image diffusion model with classifier-free guidance — technical foundation for DALL·E 2 and the models that follow.