Import AI 425: iPhone video generation; subtle misalignment; making open weight models safe through surgical deletion

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On-phone video generation is going to be here sooner than you think:
…Snap shows how to squeeze a video model onto an iPhone…
Researchers with Snap Inc have figured out how to get video generation running at 10FPS on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, paving the way for infinite, promptable videos on top-of-the-range smartphones.

What they did: This research paper lays out a recipe they used to get good quality video generation to fit into a small enough computational package that they can fit it on a phone. Their resulting model is 0.9B parameters (versus ~1-2B for other similarly small-sized models) and obtains decent but not state-of-the-art scores on video quality.
To make the model, they started with a 2B parameter Diffusion Transformer then 'pruned' it to get it down to under a billion parameters so it could fit on an iPhone. They also do finetuning to take this pruned model and get it to generate higher quality outputs.
The results are quite good - I'd encourage readers to check out the site to get a feel for them.

Why this matters: Soon, your phone will be generating not just on-device text and images, but videos, as this research shows. And then a little after that, perhaps entire worlds (via massively optimized world models, which will be the successors of things like Genie3). This all points to a future where everyone is surrounded by "instant imagination", and will unlock a broad range of applications.
Read more: Taming Diffusion Transformer for Real-Time Mobile Video Generation (arXiv).
View samples from the model at the project page (Snap Research, GitHub).

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AI2 gets $152 million for building an open AI ecosystem:
…NSF and NVIDIA fund the research non-profit…
The National Science Foundation has awarded $75m to the AI research organization the Allen Institute for AI Research (AI2), and NVIDIA has awarded it $77m as well. "The partnership supports the NSF Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure project, Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI)," AI2 writes in a post announcing the funding. "OMAI will build a national level fully open AI ecosystem to drive scientific discovery through AI, while also advancing the science of AI itself."

Why this matters - your tax dollars are (effectively!) being ...