AI Video Gets Consistent with Runway’s Gen-4

In partnership with

Hi everyone,

This is Lore, the newsletter that helps you thrive in the age of AI.  

Thank you for being a part of 26k+ techno-optimists and growing. 🙏

P.S. The Next Wave was nominated for a Webby award for best business podcast!

Please take a moment to vote for us. It takes only 30 seconds and will help the show grow, allowing us to help even more people prosper in the age of AI.

Your job called—it wants better business news

Welcome to Morning Brew—the world’s most engaging business newsletter. Seriously, we mean it.

Morning Brew’s daily email keeps professionals informed on the business news that matters, but with a twist—think jokes, pop culture, quick writeups, and anything that makes traditionally dull news actually enjoyable.

It’s 100% free—so why not give it a shot? And if you decide you’d rather stick with dry, long-winded business news, you can always unsubscribe.

Check it out

1) Things Are Getting Better

2) AI Video Gets Character Consistency with Runway’s Gen-4

AI video took a significant leap forward this week with Runway's release of their Gen-4 model. Check out their announcement video below:

For the past two years, I've advocated AI video technology, consistently highlighting its potential despite notable challenges—chief among them the lack of character consistency. This limitation has kept AI-generated video largely in the realm of novelty rather than a serious storytelling medium.

Runway’s Gen-4 is the first AI video model that gets it close to right.

It enables you to generate consistent character appearances across shots up to 10 seconds in length, allowing characters to reappear in different scenes reliably. This capability significantly expands the creative possibilities, bringing AI-generated storytelling much closer to professional viability.

While character consistency isn't yet flawless, this marks a huge step toward making AI video a practical tool for storytelling and brand creation.

Imagine combining Gen-4 with tools like Wonder Dynamics, where you film a real actor and seamlessly replace them with a CGI character. With Gen-4, you could expand upon that footage or even use it as a foundational layer, opening endless creative possibilities.

Interestingly, we just interviewed the founder of Wonder Studio today on an upcoming episode of The Next Wave podcast. Matt and I agreed there's substantial untapped potential here—especially in using AI-generated videos for brand marketing. Think about crafting your own mascot, something like Geico’s iconic lizard mascot tailored specifically for your brand, effortlessly created and animated through AI.

Whether you're exploring these tools personally or looking to leverage them professionally, AI video has reached a critical turning point. It’s finally becoming viable for storytelling, content creation, and brand marketing.

I'm excited to see how much further we'll go in the next year as character consistency continues to improve. And, am currently playing with Gen-4 to create cutscenes for my indie game.

On a future episode of The Next Wave, we’re going to show you how to create ads using AI. Make sure you’ve subscribed!

AD

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI

3) Build a Website Using Vibe Coding

In this week’s episode of The Next Wave, Matt Wolfe and I vibe-coded a website with our friend Riley Brown. Check it out!

Also, please subscribe to The Next Wave on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

4) xAI now positioned to lead real-world AI with acquisition of X

xAI has acquired X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock transaction valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion.

At first glance, this deal might seem confusing given that Elon Musk is the main equity holder of both entities. However, I think it’s a genius strategy. Elon Musk raised capital at a super high valuation using an “AI multiple” with xAI, then leveraged that to acquire X, which as a social media company, obviously has a much lower valuation multiple.

And, now he can integrate X’s vast real-time social media data into xAI’s AI technology. Something no other company has.

I've consistently stated that Elon Musk is likely OpenAI’s most formidable competitor. Combining xAI’s growing capabilities with real-time social insights from X (Twitter) and rich real-world data from Tesla vehicles and SpaceX satellites positions Musk to surpass OpenAI in real-world AI applications.

Imagine an xAI smart device in your home capable of instantly answering real-time questions about the weather, news, politics, sports, or natural disasters. Robots that know a lot about you are designed to simplify your daily life—from mundane tasks like taking out the trash to more complex household duties or helping with your work. That’s where we’re going fast.

A recurring theme of this newsletter is the exponential acceleration of AI developments. With OpenAI also recently completing the biggest private company fundraising round in history($40B raised at $300B valuation), the pace of innovation and competition is set to intensify dramatically.

5) Things I’m Learning From

That’s all for today. Please consider sharing the newsletter with your friends if you think they’d enjoy it. 🙏

Please give me feedback on Twitter. I am still figuring out the best format for this newsletter. Which part did you like? Dislike? Do you have other suggestions? Please let me know—just tweet @NathanLands.

-Nathan