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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
xAI's new video model costs 60% more per second — and is the one model its own batch discount refuses
xAI's developer documentation now lists two generations of its video model side by side, and the gap between them is not only technical. Grok Imagine Video 1.5, whose full set of modes was announced on 31 July 2026, is billed at $0.080 per second of generated footage. The first-generation grok-imagine-video remains on the price list at $0.050 per second — a 60 percent difference for the newer model. What the higher rate buys is a native 1080p pipeline for text-to-video and image-to-video, rather than a lower-resolution render enlarged afterwards, plus a reference mode that guides a clip with several images without locking the opening frame, and the option to attach up to three preset voices to the subject. Clips run from one to fifteen seconds; separate endpoints extend an existing clip from its last frame or edit one, the latter capped at 720p and about 8.7 seconds. The less advertised part sits in the batch documentation. xAI's Batch API, which processes large volumes asynchronously at a discount, accepts image and video requests only for the first-generation grok-imagine-image and grok-imagine-video models. Both 1.5-generation models — the video model and Grok Imagine Image 2.0 — are turned away with an explicit "not supported for batch processing" error. For anyone generating footage in bulk, the newer model is therefore dearer twice over: a higher per-second rate, and no access to the cheaper queue. The documentation also discloses how text-to-video actually works on this model. Rather than a single pass, xAI writes, the model generates a first frame from the prompt and then animates it; the intermediate image is never returned to the caller, though it is a single billable request.
Grok Imagine Video 1.5 →ByteDance's new video model holds one shot for thirty seconds - and its API card quietly says 720p, not 4K
ByteDance Seed's Seedance 2.5 is the first of the company's video models built for scenes rather than clips. The ceiling on a single generation rose from fifteen seconds to thirty, and the documentation is explicit that those thirty seconds are one coherent take - not segments stitched together, which is how most tools reach that length. Audio is produced in the same pass as the picture, and a reference track of speech, music or sound effects can be the sole input, with pacing and lip movement fitted to it. The capability the company puts first is what it calls omni reference. One request may carry up to fifty assets - thirty images, ten video clips and ten audio files - and the model reads them together. Practically, that turns the endpoint into four tools at once: text-to-video, generation from a first frame or a first-and-last frame pair, timestamp-level editing of an existing video (replacing a subject, removing an object, repainting part of a frame while keeping the original aspect ratio and duration), and extending a clip forwards or backwards. Output was widened to mov with H.264 video and PCM audio so that colour and sound survive an edit. One figure in circulation does not hold up. Much of the coverage credits Seedance 2.5 with 4K output; the model card on BytePlus ModelArk lists 480p and 720p for dreamina-seedance-2-5-260628, and it is the older Seedance 2.0 entry that is documented up to 1080p and 4K. The pricing table is equally specific - USD 10.70 per million tokens without video input and USD 6.40 with it - and applies to 480p and 720p outputs only. As with the rest of ByteDance's video line, no weights, parameter count or technical report were published.
Seedance 2.5 →Seven weeks left for Sora 2: OpenAI's video API shuts down on 24 September, with no successor named
OpenAI's deprecation table now puts a hard date on the most talked-about video model of 2025: sora-2, sora-2-pro and every dated snapshot (sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08, sora-2-pro-2025-10-06) stop working on 24 September 2026. The Videos API endpoint that served them is being retired at the same time. The withdrawal was announced on 24 March 2026, which leaves roughly seven weeks for anything still generating video through OpenAI. The detail worth noticing is the empty column. OpenAI's deprecation entries normally point developers at a replacement model; the Sora rows list none, and no successor video model has been announced. That makes this a rare case of a major lab leaving a product category rather than upgrading within it — a model that was less than a year old, arrived with synchronized dialogue and sound, plausible object physics and consent-controlled cameos of real people, and shipped an app that put AI video in front of a mass audience. Sora 2 keeps its profile in our catalogue. We do not delete profiles when a model is retired, and the entry has been rewritten to state the shutdown date, the API tiers and pricing as they stood, and the fact that industry reports of the consumer app closing in April 2026 go beyond what OpenAI's own documentation confirms.
Sora 2 →