Meta, challenging OpenAI, announces new AI model that can generate video with sound

By Katie Paul

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Facebook owner Meta announced on Friday it had built a new AI model called Movie Gen that can create realistic-seeming video and audio clips in response to user prompts, claiming it can rival tools from leading media generation startups like OpenAI and ElevenLabs.

Samples of Movie Gen’s creations provided by Meta showed videos of animals swimming and surfing, as well as videos using people’s real photos to depict them performing actions like painting on a canvas.

Movie Gen also can generate background music and sound effects synced to the content of the videos, Meta said in a blog post.

People can use the tool to edit existing videos as well, the company said.

In one sample video, Meta had the tool insert pom-poms into the hands of a man running by himself in the desert, while in another it transformed a parking lot in a video of a man skateboarding from dry ground into one covered by a splashing puddle.

(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Additional reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Mark Porter)