Introducing Flow, Google's new AI video tool and Sora competitor

Google's AI Era is officially officially here, and at the center of it is a new generative video model called Flow.

At the Google I/O 2025 keynote event on May 20, Google unveiled a new suite of AI video tools, powered by state-of-the-art models.

The offspring of media models Veo 3 and Imagen 4, Flow is Google's answer to OpenAI's Sora — AI tools for a new era in video generation for filmmakers and creatives. However, unlike Sora, Flow comes with native audio generation baked right in.

Pitched as an “AI filmmaking tool built for creatives, by creatives,” Flow is the tech giant's latest attempt to demo the power of AI as a use case in reshaping the creative process. As shown on stage at Google I/O, if you feed it a text prompt like "an older man driving a convertible through the desert," you get full cinematic scenes: coherent characters, consistent locations, editable camera angles, and seamless scene extensions.

Credit: Google

According to Google, the goal here isn’t to replace human creativity — it’s to amplify it. Flow, named after that elusive zone where ideas just click, aims to offload the technical grunt work so "you can stay in the zone."

To show what Flow can really do, Google tapped filmmakers from around the world, including Darren Aronofsky, who debuted their short films made with Flow.

But Flow doesn’t stop at generation — it wants to own the full creative pipeline. There’s integrated support for editing, organizing, and tweaking your projects. With Gemini in the loop, you can refine narrative beats on the fly. Want to send the car flying off a cliff mid-scene, with a chicken flapping its wings in slow-mo descent? No problem.

Again, this is powered by the fusion of Veo 3 and Imagen 4, with Gemini also powering things from under the hood. For those unfamiliar, Veo handles high-fidelity video while Imagen tackles one of AI’s classic stumbling blocks: text rendering. Imagen 4 is the latest update from Google with smarter typography, layout handling, and visual design, making it viable for anything from film titles to slick slide decks.

Both models are rolling out today via the Gemini app.

Of course, all this next-gen creativity comes with a price tag. Flow is part of Google AI Ultra, the company’s new $249/month pro subscription tier. That gets you access to Flow — and everything else AI that Google has announced at I/O.

However, if you don't want to shell out all that money, Google AI Pro users (formerly AI Premium) can use a slightly downgraded version of Flow that runs on Veo 2.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.