Video agents are the next frontier in generative media

Latent Space published a long interview (2026-06-01) with Ethan He, formerly at NVIDIA and recently at xAI, about the development and future of Grok Imagine and the broader direction of video generation. Ethan describes how xAI shipped a multimodal video model quickly (from zero to first model in three months), explains technical building blocks (VAEs, diffusion transformers, temporal compression, step distillation), and highlights practical constraints (storage, egress, GPU hours). He argues that much of video-model intelligence will come from language models and agentic orchestration — not only from video-training data — and predicts “video agents” (systems that plan, generate, edit, and iterate creative video workflows) will be a dominant trend as inference costs fall and iteration speed improves. The conversation covers Grok Imagine features, Grok Imagine Agent (beta), reference-to-video / long-context techniques, audio-video alignment, watermarking, and Ethan’s move to focus more on LLM research.