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Lightricks, the Israeli company behind the viral photo-editing app Facetune, is launching an ambitious effort to shake up the generative AI landscape. The company announced today the release of LTX Video (LTXV), an open-source AI model capable of generating five seconds of high-quality video in just four seconds. By making its video model freely available, Lightricks is taking direct aim at the growing dominance of proprietary AI systems from tech giants like OpenAI, Adobe, and Google.
“We believe foundational models are going to be a commodity, and you can’t build an actual business around foundational models,” said Zeev Farbman, Co-founder and CEO of Lightricks, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “If startups want to have a serious chance to compete, the technology needs to be open, and you want to make sure that people in the top universities across the world have access to your model and add capabilities on top of it.”
With real-time processing, scalability for long-form video, and a compact architecture that runs efficiently even on consumer-grade hardware, LTXV is poised to make professional-grade generative video technology accessible to a broader audience—an approach that could disrupt the industry’s status quo.
We prompted LTXV to create a high-fashion scene. The model generated this cinematic sequence featuring a businesswoman in an urban setting—complete with consistent lighting, reflective surfaces, and professional-grade cinematography—all in four seconds. (Credit: Lightricks/VentureBeat)
How Lightricks weaponizes open source to challenge AI giants
Lightricks’ decision to release LTXV as open source is a calculated gamble designed to differentiate the company in an increasingly crowded generative AI market. The model, with its two billion parameters, is designed to run efficiently on widely available GPUs, such as the NVIDIA RTX 4090, while maintaining high visual fidelity and motion consistency.
This move comes at a time when many leading AI models—from OpenAI’s DALL-E to Google’s Imagen—are locked behind APIs, requiring developers to pay for access. Lightricks, by contrast, is betting that openness will foster innovation and adoption.
Farbman compared LTXV’s launch to Meta’s release of its open-source Llama language models, which quickly gained traction in the AI community and helped Meta establish itself in a space dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “The business rationale is that if the community adopts it, if people in academia adopt it, w …