Pika Launched and Now I Have to Recalibrate Everything Again
AI video just crossed a threshold nobody publicly admitted was coming this fast.
Pika forced a recalibration that kept getting forced. By the time the recalibration settled, Sora and Runway Gen-3 had moved the goalposts again. Pika is still around but it's a middle-tier player now. The "you could always tell" era ended roughly six months after this post.
Karpathy posted the Pika launch video today and I've been sitting here watching it loop for longer than I'd like to admit.
The thing about AI video is that it's been bad in a very legible way — jittery, melting hands, that particular uncanny shimmer that telegraphs "a computer hallucinated this." You could always tell. The tell was part of the deal. You learned to set your expectations accordingly and moved on.
This is different.
Not because it's perfect — it isn't — but because the gap between "this is clearly fake" and "wait, hold on" just collapsed by about two years in a single product launch. That's the part that makes your stomach drop a little. Not the clips themselves. The rate.
The Pika video does this thing where it's beautiful and wrong at the same time, in proportions you haven't seen before. More beautiful than expected, less wrong than it has any right to be given where we were six months ago.
Karpathy shared it without much commentary. He didn't need to. The video does the thing where it argues for itself.
Whatever your mental model was for where AI video would be in 2025, update it. Probably more than once.
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