Itโs hard to believe that X released Grok 4 less than six weeks ago. Remember the hentai-adjacent anime chatbot and the anarchic red panda? (Hereโs a refresher.)
OpenAIโs launch last week of GPT-5 took some of the wind out of Grokโs not-quite-suitable-for-work sails. Despite its rocky rollout, ChatGPT sits at #1 on the App Store, while Grok has been struggling to stay in the top 5. (No shadeโTikTok is #15).
So Elon did what Elon does, and has been rustling up some attention.
No, weโre not talking about X temporarily suspending Grokโs account, which Musk called โjust a dumb error.โ Weโre talking about leveraging one thing Grok has that ChatGPT doesnโt: image-to-video. About the same time GPT-5 came out, Musk announced Grok Imagine would be free to U.S. users โfor the next few days.โ It hasnโt been enough to move the needle past OpenAI, but itโs keeping Grok in the picture.
Of course, the question for Grok users is: How long will they be able to keep using Imagine to make 12-second homages of Elon riding a horse into battle? Itโs unlikely that the video generation tool will remain gratis forever, meaning that if youโve just come for the videos but donโt want to stay for the anti-social behavior, youโve got options.
Weโve been keeping track of text-to-video launches at Product Hunt. Here are a few:
Sora: OpenAI does do text-to-video and image-to-video within Sora, but its video generation model isnโt included as part of ChatGPT. There were some hopeful murmurings that V2 would be integrated into GPT-5, but alas, weโre still waiting to see it. Still, V1 won our Golden Kitty for AI for Video in 2024.
Runway: Gen-3 Alpha, RunwayMLโs video-generation base model, took silver in the Golden Kitties last year. This year, Runway has already released Gen-4 as well as its Aleph video-editing tool. With the latter, you can add an image to influence how the video turns out, i.e., make the video take on certain characteristics of the image.
Veo: Our Golden Kitty bronze medalist last year, Veo won points for lasting longer than a minute. Another bonus: Google maximalists can use it as part of their Gemini subscriptions. Google introโd V3 model this May with a powerful new feature competitors lack: sound. The frame-to-video feature, however, still has some kinks.
We could go on. Just this year:
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Hedra released Character-3
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Luma announced a faster, cheaper model of its mobile-first model
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Higgsfield came out and began rapidly bolting on new features
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KLING AI launched V2.1
- And AI image pioneer Midjourney released its first video model