Full AI Actors, Ghibli Dreams, and GPT-5: The AI Tsunami Is Here
- Rich Washburn
- Apr 6
- 5 min read
Remember when the biggest tech news of the week was a new iPhone color? Yeah—those were simpler times. Now, it feels like the AI arms race has gone full Mad Max, and every week is another high-speed chase across the desert of what we once thought was possible. This past week? Absolutely bonkers. We’re talking photorealistic 3D models from a single image, anime RPGs generated on the fly, deepfake-anyone tools, video mashups with dead celebrities, open-source Ghibli filters, and a new wave of OpenAI models (including the long-hyped GPT-5).
Grab your coffee (or whiskey—we're not judging), because here’s your high-octane breakdown of the biggest developments shaking up the AI world right now.
1. High 3D Gen: Single Image to Stunning 3D
Imagine taking a single photo and instantly turning it into a highly detailed 3D model—complete with a backside the original image doesn’t even show. High 3D Gen is the new king of this domain, leaving previous champs like Hunyan 3D and Trellis in the dust. From dragons with belly scales to creepy plushies holding balloons, it generates geometry with uncanny accuracy.
Caveat? No textures—just shape. But the level of fidelity it achieves is ridiculous. It uses normal-regularized latent diffusion, essentially teaching the AI to understand surface orientation and shape like a tiny Michelangelo in a data center.
Also, there's a free HuggingFace demo. Because why not make world-class 3D modeling accessible to literally anyone with an internet connection?
2. HSMR: Skeletons, Movement, and Pose—Oh My
Human Skeleton Mesh Recovery (HSMR) is another brain-melter. Feed it a single image or video, and it spits out a full 3D model with skeletal structure and pose estimation—ready to rotate, animate, or repurpose.
Unlike older pose estimation tools, HSMR gives you the bones and the meat. You can even rewatch gymnastics routines from alternate angles. Great for creators. Terrifying for anyone trying to fake an injury for insurance fraud.
3. Anime Gamer: Interactive RPGs with Just Text
A living, breathing anime game that reacts to your text prompts like a Dungeon Master with a caffeine problem? That’s Anime Gamer in a nutshell. It lets you control anime characters and worlds with natural language. Want Sosuke and Ponyo to eat dinner in a forest? Boom—scene generated. Need a boost in stamina? Rest them in a car.
Sure, it’s a bit rough around the edges (think Nintendo DS-era visuals), but conceptually? This is the prototype for infinite, user-directed storytelling. No devs. No cutscenes. Just prompts and possibility.
4. SkyReels A2: Deepfake Meets Creative Video Collage
This one's basically Photoshop meets Spielberg. Upload a few reference images—say, a beach, a man, and a pug—and SkyReels A2 will synthesize a coherent video of all three interacting. You can even get... let’s say weirdly creative. (Looking at you, "Bill Gates force-feeding Angelina Jolie wine" clip.)
The key flex here is compositional video generation—combining disparate images, characters, and actions into a coherent narrative. It's hilariously disturbing and jaw-droppingly powerful.
5. Dream Actor M1: Deepfake Level 9000
Ready to direct a blockbuster from your garage? Dream Actor M1 can animate any character—real or imaginary—by applying reference video performances to a static image. Body movement, facial expressions, hand gestures, even camera motion. It's like Face/Off, but with way fewer Nicolas Cages.
Want Marilyn Monroe to read your startup pitch? Done. Want to animate a 3D anime fox or a low-res cow doing interpretive dance? Weird, but also doable.
This changes the film industry game dramatically. Think AI-generated casting, posthumous performances, or one-person productions where you’re the entire cast.
6. Easy Control: Multi-Condition Image Generation
Forget rigid prompt-to-image models. Easy Control is like Stable Diffusion's nerdy cousin with a master's in control nets. It combines edge maps, depth maps, color guides, and style prompts to give you precision control over generated images.
Want to insert a woolly octopus on a vintage car in the snow, drawn in vector art style? It can do that—and preserve the style while doing it.
Also, it turns your images into Studio Ghibli-style dreamscapes. For free. Open-source. Zero gatekeeping.
7. Luminina MGBT-2: Open-Source GPT-4o Image Rival
This might be the quiet mic drop of the week. Luminina MGBT-2 is a completely new kind of image model—not based on diffusion, but auto-regression (like OpenAI’s GPT-4o). This means it generates images sequentially, giving it crazy control and flexibility.
It can:
Create from text.
Edit images with micro-precision (add a palace in the background? Easy).
Generate images from depth maps and edge sketches.
Match multiple input conditions like a visual chef d'œuvre.
Downside? It needs 80GB of VRAM. So unless you’re rocking a quad-4090 rig, you’ll need to wait for a quantized version.
8. Mocha by Meta: Five-Second Video Dreams
Meta’s Mocha takes text + voice and turns it into short (and impressively realistic) video clips. Think of it as early Siri meets Spielberg. A woman talking underwater? Done. A man in a suit philosophizing while smoking a cigar? Already rendered.
Only caveat: it’s limited to 5 seconds and... Meta hasn’t released it yet. Classic.
9. Segment Anything in Motion: Pixel-Perfect Video Masking
Segmenting moving objects in videos is notoriously tough. Segment Any Motion nails it—even with blurry motion, shaky cameras, occlusion, and complex backgrounds. Whether it’s a racecar, a dancing woman, or a kid on a bike behind trees, this tool slices through motion like butter.
It combines motion tracking with semantic segmentation using DINO and SAM2. The results? Near-perfect segmentation masks you can use for VFX, video editing, or anything else your creative brain dreams up.
10. GPT-5 Is (Almost) Here
Let’s not bury the lead: OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced that GPT-5 is on the way—just a few months out. But before that, they're releasing the long-awaited 03 and 04 mini models (as standalone upgrades). These are expected to blow GPT-4 out of the water—especially in logic, math, and STEM tasks.
GPT-5 itself will be a mixture of experts, able to dynamically switch between different specialized models (like GPT-4o for vision, GPT-03 for reasoning, etc.) depending on what you ask. That means smarter, faster, and way more context-aware performance.
Basically: if you thought ChatGPT was smart now, buckle up.
Honorable Mentions
Wondershare Verbbo: Your new favorite AI video tool for content creation, dubbing, and avatar generation.
MidJourney V7 & Runway Gen-4: Both dropped new versions… both a bit underwhelming. V7 still fumbles hands and text. Gen-4 still struggles with action. Great branding, not quite top-tier anymore.
VASE by Alibaba: Now finally released! Allows outpainting videos, character inpainting, motion transfer—essentially a Swiss Army knife for video editing with AI.
Final Thoughts: We're Not in Kansas Anymore
If you’ve been waiting for the “real” AI revolution to begin, this is it. Every single category of digital creativity—writing, design, animation, filmmaking, gaming—is being disrupted right now. And not just by tech giants, but by open-source communities and indie developers dropping tools you can try today.
We’re not just talking about changing workflows here—we’re talking about democratizing entire industries. Your next video game might be designed on the fly by a text prompt. Your next film might not require actors. Your next design project might start with a napkin sketch and end with a photorealistic 3D render, all without touching a modeling app.
Wild times, my friends.
Stay sharp. Stay curious. Stay en-Rich’d. 🤟🏼
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