Two Things That Dropped This Week and One of Them Is Genuinely Funny

Apollo landed on GitHub quietly this week — a family of video-language models that can watch and understand hour-long videos, which sounds like a solved problem until you remember that almost nothing can actually do it without hallucinating the plot.

Small models. That's the part that got me. Not some 70B behemoth that costs a dollar a query — models in the 1-7B range, capable of temporal reasoning across content that would take a human ninety minutes to watch. The obvious application everybody will reach for is surveillance and sports. The obviously correct application is episodic television. Feed it a full season of a prestige drama, ask it where the foreshadowing lives, and get something back that would take a very dedicated Reddit thread three years to produce. The models are from Meta Research, the repo is public, and I have been staring at the benchmark numbers for longer than I should admit.

Then there's Veo 2.

Google just dropped their second video generation model and it makes Sora look like it was announced on a bad day — which, to be fair, it was. OpenAI spent a year hyping Sora, gave it a theatrical release, and then Google DeepMind shipped something that apparently handles physics and motion coherence in ways that make Sora's outputs look like they were rendered in a hurry. Which, again, they were.

The funny part is that Sora hadn't even been available to most people for more than a week before Veo 2 appeared to fold its coat neatly over a chair and sit down next to it.

This is what it looks like when the lab with infinite compute finally stops holding back. It is not subtle.