Open-Source Video Generation: Diffusion & Transformer Models - AI Build & Learn

Welcome to AI Build & Learn, a weekly AI engineering stream where we pick a new topic and learn by building together. ​This event is about generating video with AI, picking up where the image generation event left off. As with images, there's no single model we're committed to — we'll explore several and see how far the open-source options have come. Open source is the focus, but commercial models (Sora, Runway, and others) are fair game if you want to compare. ​Most current video models build on the same diffusion foundations as image generation, extended across time and increasingly using transformer/DiT backbones. We'll try a few open-source text-to-video and image-to-video models and talk through the practical tradeoffs: quality, clip length, speed, and hardware requirements. ​Some things to look up to get started: ​ Open-source models: * ​Wan 2.2 (Alibaba Tongyi): versatile MoE model: text-to-video, image-to-video, and editing in one * ​HunyuanVideo (Tencent): strong cinematic / photorealistic quality * ​LTX-Video / LTX-2 (Lightricks): the fast one; ~5s clip in under a minute on a single GPU * ​CogVideoX (Zhipu / THUDM): best at following detailed, multi-part prompts * ​Mochi 1 (Genmo): flow-matching model known for fluid, coherent motion * ​Stable Video Diffusion (Stability AI): earlier image-to-video, still widely used ​Tooling: * ​Hugging Face Diffusers: video pipelines: https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers * ​ComfyUI: node-based workflows (popular for video too): https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI ​​​Resources * ​​​GitHub: https://github.com/sagecodes/ai-build-and-learn * ​​​Events Calendar: https://luma.com/ai-builders-and-learners * ​​​Slack (Discuss during the week): https://slack.flyte.org/ * ​​​Hosted by Sage Elliott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sageelliott/ ​​In this stream * Intro to topic * ​​​​Community Discussion * Practical examples ​​​Community challenge (optional) ​​​Try spending 30–90 minutes during the week learning or building something related to the topic, then share what you’re working on in Slack. ​​​Note on Flyte / Union ​​​You may see Flyte used in some demos. Flyte is an open-source AI orchestration platform maintained by Union (where I work) for building scalable, durable, and observable AI workflows. You do not need to use Flyte to participate. * ​​​Union: https://www.union.ai/ * ​​​Flyte: https://flyte.org/ ​​​Drop a comment with ideas for future topics (agents, RAG, MLOps, robotics, frameworks, and more).