Welcome back to the AI For Humans Newsletter!

We spend a LOT of time talking about and testing new AI video models and there are some great ones on the market today. Runway GEN-3 is remarkable, Sora is good & will get better (and you get free credits if you pay for ChatGPT+) and there’s a bunch more we like.

But VEO 2. Wow. This feels like the next-gen, state-of-the-art, ‘how is that actually AI video’ sort sea change that we’ve been expecting. It’s not perfect & it’s still in closed beta but we’ve been having a blast with it, as has show favorite AI academic Ethan Mollick.

It’s not perfect (the tool’s UX and lack of image-to-video isn’t great) but here’s what we think makes it better than everything else out there right now:

• VEO 2 can generate significant and realistic looking real-world footage and physics. Not perfect by any means but light years better than what we’ve seen so far.

• Better generations, more often: When working with something like Runway or Sora, it truly is a crapshoot and I’d say like 80% of footage you end up throwing out. With VEO 2, it’s closer to 50/50 or maybe even better than that. Nearly every output has a few seconds of great footage.

• Being trained on Youtube (clearly this is the case) gives them an astronomical amount more data than nearly any of the other video models and they keep getting more every day.

All of this shows us that 2025 could actually be a MASSIVE year for Google and they will push hard to re-take their lead across the entire AI space. It’s pretty important to remember when it comes to the grand AI race that while moats may be small for the top models/companies, it certainly helps to have a money printing engine to continue to make huge and expensive bets.

Of course, it wouldn’t be AI For Humans unless we did something absolutely terrible and cursed with VEO 2, so if you haven’t yet seen our commercial for BIG MAYO, check it out below.

See you Thursday!

-Kevin & Gavin

We 💛 This - Reddit Answers

The great Google-unbundling continues! Now with a brand new way to Google search Reddit… Reddit Answers. And in our early testing it works pretty well.

It’s a chat assistant that happily plunges the depths of Reddit on your behalf, and at the very least ought to be a more effective way to fetch answers from Reddit.

That being said it’s another example of user data being gobbled up in a way perhaps you never intended when sharing Granddad’s favorite method to lubricate a squeaky door hinge.