Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species
A new squid speciesβof the Gonatidae familyβwas discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs.
Research paper.
A new squid speciesβof the Gonatidae familyβwas discovered. The video shows her holding a brood of very large eggs.
Research paper.
The trailer for Amazonβs reportedly troubled $250m action-comedy shows that it might just be weightless action mush
Red One, the upcoming Christmas movie from Amazon, is arguably among the most talked-about of the year. However, until now, the conversation has had little to do with the film itself. Instead, Red One looks set to go down in history as the film that tanked Dwayne βThe Rockβ Johnsonβs reputation.
For the newcomers: in April, The Wrap ran a feature about exactly how troubled Red Oneβs production allegedly was, with several insiders pointing to The Rockβs chronic unwillingness to work as a key factor. Among claims of his wrongdoing, The Rock was accused of repeatedly showing up eight hours late to set, and also making his assistant dispose of bottles of his own urine that heβd fill when he couldnβt be bothered to walk to a bathroom.
Continue reading...Β© Photograph: Frank Masi/Amazon Prime
Β© Photograph: Frank Masi/Amazon Prime
Enlarge / Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt "A giant humanoid, made of fluffy blue cotton candy, stomping on the ground, and roaring to the sky, clear blue sky behind them." (credit: Runway)
On Sunday, Runway announced a new AI video synthesis model called Gen-3 Alpha that's still under development, but it appears to create video of similar quality to OpenAI's Sora, which debuted earlier this year (and has also not yet been released). It can generate novel, high-definition video from text prompts that range from realistic humans to surrealistic monsters stomping the countryside.
Unlike Runway's previous best model from June 2023, which could only create two-second-long clips, Gen-3 Alpha can reportedly create 10-second-long video segments of people, places, and things that have a consistency and coherency that easily surpasses Gen-2. If 10 seconds sounds short compared to Sora's full minute of video, consider that the company is working with a shoestring budget of compute compared to more lavishly funded OpenAIβand actually has a history of shipping video generation capability to commercial users.
Gen-3 Alpha does not generate audio to accompany the video clips, and it's highly likely that temporally coherent generations (those that keep a character consistent over time) are dependent on similar high-quality training material. But Runway's improvement in visual fidelity over the past year is difficult to ignore.
Fantastic footage of a Dana squid attacking a camera at a depth of about a kilometer.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I havenβt covered.
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