Another Sora AI Video Competitor Emerges with Runway’s Hyper-Realistic Gen-3 Alpha

While OpenAI might have stolen all of the headlines when they debuted their AI video model Sora—which, at the time, appeared to be lightyears ahead of the rest of the AI video industry—it appears that Sora’s market dominance is gone before it even officially releases.

Last week we saw Luma AI release Dream Machine, a Sora-esque AI video model that is out and available to try right now. And this week we’ve gotten news that Runway is ready to unveil their latest Gen-3 Alpha AI video model and showcase its own Sora-level capabilities.

So, regardless of your stance on AI, let’s take a look at this new development and explore its generative video powers.

Introducing Runway Gen-3 Alpha

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We covered Runway ML on the site several times in the past. Which, in the age of AI, means that Runway is an old-timer in this space at this point. So it’s no surprise that Runway’s been hard at work developing its AI technologies to expand upon its Gen-1 and Gen-2 models.

This new Gen-3 Alpha promises to be “a new frontier for high-fidelity, controllable video generation,” and is a first look at a new upcoming series of models trained by Runway on a new infrastructure built for large-scale multimodal training.

Runway also reports that this new Gen-3 Alpha is a step towards their goal of building General World Models, which is their belief that the next major advancements in AI will come from systems that better understand the visual world and its dynamics.

Runaway Gen-3 Alpha Video Capabilities

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As you can see in the examples, we’ll let the samples of Gen-3 Alpha speak for themselves as to how great (or not great) they look to you. That being said, Runway has shared that this new model is being trained jointly on videos and images as well as highly descriptive, temporally dense captions, which should unlock capabilities for imaginative transitions and precise key-framing of elements in your scenes.

The new Gen-3 Alpha will also power Runway’s Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video tools, as well as still allow for the use of familiar control modes such as Motion Brush, Advanced Camera Controls, and Runway’s Director Mode which is one of the better video tools for AI.

Price and Availability

So far all we have as far as price and availability is a form on Runway’s website inviting organizations interested in Gen-3 Alpha to contact them directly. No price or timeline for its rollout has been shared just yet.