Alibaba's Mindblowing New EMO Lets You Generate Video with Audio or Still Images

Welcome Artisan,

You now have the power of a Hollywood studio in your pocket.

As much as I like to hype the disruption of traditionally gated industries, especially those in the creative fields, I may be underplaying just how disruptive the next few years will be. AI video is getting extremely close to its ChatGPT moment, and it’s going to break people’s brains.

Hollywood studios are already canceling $800 million studios over the demos of the past few weeks.

Today, Alibaba enters the game with its newest release, EMO. Emote Portrait Alive for long, this new tool takes a still image and audio as input and creates a high-quality portrait video as output. It looks crazy.

Let’s dive in.

The One Big Thing

You are now a major motion picture director

When I talk about the AI Renaissance, it’s usually because of new tools and releases like EMO by Alibaba.

The Renaissance is a time when creation takes a great leap forward, when ideas spring up out of random pockets of the earth, and when new ways of thinking and living take hold because the world sees things they have never been exposed to before. New forms of art and new theories of the world that come from people and groups that previously stayed unheard.

This is where we are headed.

As more models come out that democratize access to the greatest tools we have at our disposal, the flurry of new and radical forms of expression we see will be explosive. What happens when billions of people suddenly have access to the same equipment that an extremely small group of individuals in the Los Angeles region only had access to in the past?

My guess is that the productions and artwork of the future will look very little like those of the past.

One of the greatest exports of American industry in the past century has been culture, with Hollywood being front and center. It’s unclear how much longer that will last, if at all.

Hollywood’s moat historically has been expensive production equipment, access to talent, and (importantly) robust distribution networks that ensure a strong business model centered around the production of high end entertainment. In this new age we are entering, the costs of production equipment are headed towards zero, and access to talent will be open and free (although there is a large discussion to be had around IP and rights licensing that we will skip for today).

The only moat left for this industry is access to distribution, which, in case you haven’t heard, is currently being torn apart by TikTok and YouTube. It’s a precarious future for anyone in that industry.

This process is what economists call creative destruction and is necessary for any large scale economic transition. This is where we are now.

Where we are headed is much more glorious.

Inspiration / Gallery / Artisan Board

Today is EMO Gallery day:

Bonus: Rendering protein structures inside cells at the atomic level with Unreal Engine

Tools

Must have tools for every Renaissance creator to add to their toolkit:

Deep Tech

The newest and coolest in the research world that you need to know about:

Closing Thought

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