OpenAI may have shed Sora, but Google’s AI video ambitions are far from over.

On Tuesday, the company announced Veo 3.1 Lite, the latest edition to its video generation family of models and its “most cost-effective video model,” the company said in its announcement. Google said that Veo can build high-volume video applications at half the cost and roughly the same speed as its previous Veo model.

Veo 3.1 Lite supports both text and image inputs, and can generate both landscape and portrait ratios at resolutions up to 1080p. Veo 3.1 Lite can cost as little as 5 cents per second, compared to 40 cents per second for Veo 3.1 standard. The model is available to developers in both the Gemini API and Google AI Studio.

Additionally, Google is giving users a discount on Veo 3.1 Fast, its mid-range video generation model, starting April 7, cutting generation costs to 10 cents per second for 720p and 12 cents per second for 1080p.

In a post on X, Logan Kilpatrick, a member of technical staff for Google DeepMind, said that video is “here to stay.”

Google’s courting of AI video customers comes as OpenAI casts off its own video-generation efforts by ditching Sora and ending its $1 billion, three-year licensing partnership with Disney. The company’s Sora switchup signals a broader refocusing of its compute towards more revenue-generating products and redirecting its video model staff to world models. Since video models are incredibly compute-intensive, it makes sense that the video model was on the chopping block.

“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, told staff in an all-hands meeting, according to Business Insider.

But Google isn’t the only one trying to fill the vacuum left in Sora’s wake. Elon Musk-owned xAI is “doubling down” on AI video with the next release of Grok Imagine, the lab’s own video generation model. But as xAI faces an ever-growing pile of lawsuits over its image generation capabilities, Google may have a better shot at appealing to a wider audience.

Our Deeper View

Google’s ability to press further into video generation while OpenAI backs off is a prime example of the company’s edge in the AI market. While AI companies scrap for every morsel of compute they can get their hands on, Google sits atop a legacy. The company spent years building Google Cloud into one of the big three cloud hyperscalers, giving it a much-needed wealth of compute resources. Additionally, having cemented its billions in the digital advertising and search markets, Google doesn’t have to worry about the revenue picture as much as rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. Because of this, Google can take on the “side quests” as Simo called them, cornering a market while it’s still nascent.