Summary
- AI advancements in Gemini Live, Meta AI, and OpenAI’s Sora are leading the way. Google and OpenAI have video generation models too.
- Google Veo 2 users will pay 50 cents per second for video generation, making it $30 per minute.
- Value proposition: Google positions Veo 2 as ideal for creating high-quality, two-minute videos, but Sora is available alongside several other AI features for $200 per month with ChatGPT Pro.
AI is finally icing along from being a simple text-based chatbot. Google’s Gemini Live handles voice interactions, Meta’s AI integrated into its platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp can generate cartoonish images, and OpenAI’s Sora is already creating video using textual prompts. Now, Google’s rival video generation model is ready to meet user demands with version 2, and the company just revealed how much the processing power and convenience will cost.
If you haven’t heard much about Google Veo, we wouldn’t be too surprised since Gemini is the more consumer-centric AI product the company offers. Moreover, Veo was announced rather recently at Google I/O last year, and it went into the preview stage in the first week of December. With the updated model, users can supply short video clips and images in addition to the textual prompts before processing begins. However, pricing for using this service was just revealed rather discreetly.
TechCrunch reports that Google Veo 2 users will have to spend 50 cents per second of generated video, which multiplied sixty times equals $30 per minute of video, or $1,800 per hour. In comparison, OpenAI’s Sora is now available to all ChatGPT Pro subscribers for the unchanged price of $200 per month. Sora is an addition to all the other features included, such as the Operator that can execute complex linked actions on your behalf and just started rolling out widely.
Explaining the value proposition
And the use cases
Source: Google
Google advertises Veo 2 as an ideal tool to create two-minute clips or longer, free from artefacts like poor imagination which plagued the first generation of this model. Perhaps in an attempt to make the pricing seem attractive from a value standpoint, Google DeepMind researcher Jon Barron reportedly compared the pricing to the $356 million production cost for Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame movie, which works out to be around $32,000 per second on film.
However, it’s worth noting that Sora, Veo, and other AI models aren’t feature-film-ready yet, and certainly aren’t the endgame AI for video generation. However, Google is now stands a fighting chance against OpenAI and other services. It remains accessible through the Vertex AI from Google Cloud, and VideoFX from Labs in selected countries.
