Alibaba- and Tencent-backed startup Minimax, one of China’s “AI tigers,” has released its Video-01 text-to-video model, which can generate highly accurate depictions of humans, down to their hand motions. Minimax unveiled the new tool Saturday at its inaugural developer conference in Shanghai.
Another Chinese 'Sora': A new AI video tool launched today by Minimax, backed by major investors Alibaba Group and Tencent. 🎞️
Check out their official AI film Magic Coin🪙, created entirely with text-to-video .
🥁Try it for free now: https://t.co/Kl1avPXkFL pic.twitter.com/df14ZVq1Es
— Junie Lau (@JunieLauX) August 31, 2024
Video-01 enables users to create 6-second 1280 x 720 resolution videos at 25 frames per second (fps) using text prompts, reportedly in about 2 minutes. At the conference, Minimax CEO Yan Junjie pointed out that this is only the first iteration of the model and that future updates will include the ability to generate video from images and edit those generated videos, per the South China Morning Post “We have indeed made significant progress in video model generation, and based on internal evaluations and scores, our performance is better than that of Runway in generating videos,” he told reporters.
To try Video-01 for yourself, head to the Video-01 website. While writing of this article, the site was inundated with users, so the video-generation process took closer to 5 minutes but did not require me to enter a mobile number or otherwise log in to use it. As with other leading video AIs like Kling and Runway, you can dictate cinematic camera movements in your text prompt. The resulting video quality was pretty good, strikingly lifelike, and did not present any significant visual hallucinations commonly found in similar free AI tools. The video is also downloadable as an .MP4 file.
Video-01 joins an increasingly crowded video-generation market, even without the highly anticipated arrival of OpenAI’s Sora. Two other “Tigers,” Shengshu AI and Zhipu AI (both of which are valued at more than $1 billion, released their own text-to-video tools in July, as did Kaishou Industries with Kling.AI. Byte Dance also recently released its Jimeng text-to-video app on the Apple and Android app stores, though it is only available to users in China. Stateside, Minimax will have to contend with the likes of Luma Labs’ Dream Machine and Runway’s Gen-3.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.