A Rival to Runway Emerges; Meta’s AI Drama; A Robotics Vet Becomes a VC

In the past two months, the number of people using a Discord server dubbed Pika has quietly grown from zero to more than 160,000. Thousands of users post requests such as, “a sleek, electric car silently glides across the screen against a backdrop of futuristic cityscapes” and “clouds move with breeze.” The server spits back three-second AI-generated video clips in return.

The startup hasn’t gotten much press attention, but it’s gotten a lot of venture capital action and is trying to raise money for the third time in five months.

Stanford University artificial intelligence PhD student Demi Guo founded Pika in late April under the name “Mellis Labs,” with fellow PhD student Chenlin Meng later joining as a cofounder. The two developed a model that generates video from text descriptions of what a user wants to see, similar to the one Google-backed Runway uses. (Guo and Meng declined to comment.)