It’s ludicrous to think that these folks formed the company just six months ago, and even more ludicrous to see what the model can already do—from video synthesis, to image animation, to inpainting/outpainting:

Our vision for Pika is to enable everyone to be the director of their own stories and to bring out the creator in each of us. Today, we reached a milestone that brings us closer to our vision. We are thrilled to unveil Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon and cinematic, and a new web experience that makes it easier to use. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.

This tech—or something much like it—is going to be a very BFD. Imagine simply describing the change you’d like to see in your image—and then seeing it.

[Generative models] still face limitations when it comes to offering precise control. That’s why we’re introducing Emu Edit, a novel approach that aims to streamline various image manipulation tasks and bring enhanced capabilities and precision to image editing.

Emu Edit is capable of free-form editing through instructions, encompassing tasks such as local and global editing, removing and adding a background, color and geometry transformations, detection and segmentation, and more. […]

Emu Edit precisely follows instructions, ensuring that pixels in the input image unrelated to the instructions remain untouched. For instance, when adding the text “Aloha!” to a baseball cap, the cap itself should remain unchanged.

Read more here & here.

And for some conceptually related (but technically distinct) ideas, see previous: Iterative creation with ChatGPT.

I’m really digging the experience of (optionally) taking a photo, feeding it into ChatGPT, and then riffing my way towards an interesting visual outcome. Here’s a gallery in which you can see some of the journeys I’ve undertaken recently.

• Image->description->image quality is often pretty hit-or-miss. Even so, it’s such a compelling possibility that I keep wanting to try it (e.g. seeing a leaf on the ground, wanting to try turning it into a stingray).
• The system attempts to maintain various image properties (e.g. pose, color, style) while varying others (e.g. turning the attached vehicle from a box truck to a tanker while maintaining its general orientation plus specifics like featuring three Holstein cows).
• Overall text creation is vastly improved vs. previous models, though it can still derail. It’s striking that one can iteratively improve a particular line of text (e.g. “Make sure that the second line says ‘TRAIN’“).