Hey Reader,

AI video is having a heck of a week.

On Monday, Erich Archer, who you may remember as an IWAI student and presenter at our most recent Demo Day (free replay here) released his latest prototype – a documentary about his great-great-great-great grandfather written and generated entirely by AI.

Then yesterday, OpenAI dropped Sora, its new mind-blowing video generation model.

But before we talk about the latest advancement, let's meet Rufus Archer, who lived from 1812-1909. Erich brought him back to life with:

• ChatGPT (wrote the script)
• Perplexity (researched the events that happened during Rufus's life)
• Midjourney (created the imagery, including lifelike images from two very old photos)
• RunwayML (generated video from images)

​Watch the full video and read how Erich made it here.​

My takeaways:

• Erich would have needed a paid crew and hundreds of man-hours to produce this in the "old-fashioned" way
• Instead it cost him 20 hours of his own time and about $200
• It is good enough to run on a local TV or PBS station
• It's not that far off from award-winning Ken Burns documentaries
• Things are only going to get better – and fast

And that was just Monday.

Now, Erich is poised to take advantage of Sora, the incredible new video-generation model that OpenAI debuted yesterday. Here's an example of a video created entirely from a text prompt:

There are some pretty good video generation models on the market right now. Sora is light-years ahead of them.

Sora isn't publicly available yet, but when it comes out, guess who'll be poised to build prototypes with it right away?

Erich will.

Because he's already deep into his Innovation Cycle, one of the key concepts we teach as part of the Innovating with AI Incubator.

When you build your Innovation Cycle, you don't just build one idea – you generate a full pipeline of ideas.

Each one results in a prototype that gives you the chance to learn new skills and network with other people in AI and in your industry.

That means your AI proficiency increases and you are exposed to new opportunities simply because you're becoming known as an AI expert in your field.

Once the Innovation Cycle gets started, it's self-reinforcing. Every idea makes the next idea even better. And when you're presented with a huge advancement like Sora, you can jump right on it since you've already worked out "the basics" with your earlier experiments.

In fact, something similar happened to me with EveryAlt, the AI image-recognition tool that I launched in March 2023. About eight months later, OpenAI released GPT-4 Vision, which solved nearly all the lingering problems we were having with inaccuracies in the older image-recognition models.

If I had just sat on the idea for EveryAlt rather than building an early prototype, I probably would have been dismayed by the release of the new model – it would have seemed like my opportunity had passed me by.

Likewise, if Erich hadn't built his first video prototype in December and his second one in February, he might have been blindsided by Sora.

But because we dove in and started building, we were in a position to take advantage of the new AI advancements rather than be steamrolled by them.

That's why I'm so excited for what's coming in the next year – for Erich and the 800+ other IWAI students who are working on prototypes and building their idea pipelines.

In less than two months, you'll have the chance to see what they're working on at our next Demo Day, taking place on April 2. Mark your calendar and I'll be in touch with more details as the date approaches.

In the meantime, don't miss the Sora demo and Erich's AI-generated documentary – and reply to this email with your ideas for how you might incorporate Sora into your own business or office processes.

Talk to you soon,

– Rob Howard
Founder of Innovating with AI

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PS. I'm putting the finishing touches on my next AI education workshop. It's called "Find Your Next 5 AI Ideas".
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I started putting it together when I realized that the first step to launching an AI idea in 30 days was [insert drumroll 🥁 here] to make sure you had a really valuable idea to work on.
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If you want to be the first to hear about it, click here to join the waitlist for Find Your Next 5 AI Ideas.