Luma AI video generator Dream Machine slammed with traffic

The fast-moving AI video generation market has shifted, yet again: Luma AI, a startup backed by famed Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, today announced the free public beta of its new AI video generation model, Dream Machine, and it’s already faced a crush of users.

Though the model promises generations of up to 120 frames in 120 seconds (2 minutes, or a frame per second), the reality is that many users have been waiting hours in a digital queue on the Luma Dream Machine website for their video to process. This is due to sheer volume of traffic, according to the company.

“Hey everyone, thanks so much for all the enthusiasm and support!” wrote Barkley Dai, Luma’s product and growth lead, in a message on the firm’s Discord channel earlier today. “We are current[ly] facing high demands and working on increasing our capacity! All the generations won’t be lost but it will just be staying in the queue. Will update the status here once we have additional capacity!”

A few hours later, Dai provided the following update:

“Our team added additional capacity and as a result, the queue is now gradually shorter! In the near term, we estimate that it may still take a few hours to fully process the current backlog of pending generations. Under normal conditions – it will only take 2-3 minutes to turn your prompt into a video & we appreciate your patience as we deal with the influx of people interested in trying this revolutionary tool. Generation speed will continue to improve...

They will generate as soon as possible and we appreciate everyone’s patience and support today and encourage you to continue to revisit throughout the rest of the week and beyond as we improve Dream Machine.“

The high-quality AI video generator comes from the little-known startup Luma AI, which VentureBeat previously covered when it released its text-to-3D asset generator model Genie 1.0 in November 2023. Luma AI has raised more than $70 million, including $43 million of that in its Series B as of January 2024, according to TechCrunch.

Smartly from a PR strategy standpoint, the company seeded Dream Machine earlier with prominent AI video creators and filmmakers, who were given the chance to test its chops on generating videos from text prompts and still images prior to the opening of the public beta today, and have been posting their work throughout the day.

Others who are just getting their hands on it are also finding it to be extremely impressive, inviting comparisons to OpenAI’s Sora, while some say it is already superior.

In VentureBeat’s limited tests of Luma’s Dream Machine web app, the text-to-video feature performed with only sporadic accuracy in terms of depicting what we asked in our prompt. However, the video generated after several minutes and contained extremely smooth, non-jittery motion and high-resolution, high-detailed assets.

Clearly, the race to make compelling AI video models is entering a new gear and OpenAI’s Sora, still only available to a small group of handpicked users, is now facing seriously tough competition — not to mention fellow AI video model providers Runway, Pika, and the new Chinese competitor Kling.