Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Text-to-Video

● Core

Creating a video from a text description—"a person dancing in the rain" produces a short video clip.

Think of it like

Writing a movie scene description that the AI director turns into footage.

Example

Sora takes "a white cat playing with yarn balls" and generates a 60-second video with realistic motion and lighting.

How it actually works

Extends image diffusion to temporal dimension. Model must learn frame-to-frame consistency, realistic motion, and temporal coherence. Latent diffusion (compress frames to latent space) is efficient. Training requires paired video-text data (billions of hours). Inference is slow (1 minute of video takes minutes to generate).

For product teams

Democratizes video creation; enables rapid prototyping and visualization.

For engineers

VAE compresses video frames; temporal UNet diffuses in latent space; CLIP guides; VAE decodes frames back to pixels.

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