Nilay Patel

The new version improves the realism of outputs, boosts prompt adherence, and improves audio quality.

Still, the big change is new edit features.

Users can now include reference images for objects and characters, as well as prompting the model to remove a particular object from a previously generated clip.

They can also provide a first and last frame for a video and prompt the model to fill in the rest.

Additionally, there's a feature to extend clips based on the last few frames, allowing creators to easily string together clips into minute-long shorts.

The update comes five months after the May release of VO3, which was the single big game changer for AI video, introducing synced audio for the first time as well as delivering state-of-the-art realism.

That said, a lot has changed since VO3 was released, and while it sparked wonder and creativity, the general sentiment around 3.1 has been far less enthusiastic.

AI developer Matt Schumer wrote, My initial VO3.1 impression, disappointment.

Unfortunately, it's not just noticeably worse than Sora 2, it's also quite a bit more expensive.

One bright spot is the tooling they've added.

It seems to me a little bit like the normal pattern, where the disappointment stems from the fact that this is just an iterative update, not some big state-of-the-art advance.

VC Justine Moore noted that we've passed the threshold where video models are good enough, so we shouldn't expect anything new to be all that mind-blowing.

She commented, We have entered the product era for video models.

The recent releases, VIA 3.1, Sora 2, Runway apps, aren't a huge leap forward in terms of underlying model capabilities, but they introduce critical features like extending video, character consistency, and editing.

I think that is a perfect summary of where things are.

Expect that a lot of the updates in the immediate term when it comes to AI-generated video are going to be around how usable it is in production environments.

Speaking of new models, Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 4.5, the latest version of their small model.

The model is intended to be fast and cheap, with the claim being twice the speed of Sonnet 4 at a third of the cost.

Anthropic also claims that the new version of Haiku outperforms the previous generation Sonnet 4 in software engineering in the Sweebench Verified test.

They're also seeing outperformance against Sonnet 4 on computer use tasks, which could make the new Haiku a very capable agentic model.