First episode of the show, and the first rung of the ladder: pick a hosted AI video tool, get a clip out of it fast, and learn the one skill that survives every model swap, reading the live leaderboard and benching the top few tools on your own shot.
Tutorial. We cover the mindset shift from cost-per-generation to cost-per-finished-clip, a light glossary for total beginners (prompt, seed, aspect ratio, text-to-video vs image-to-video, credits), and a copyable first-clip workflow on a free front-end like Google Flow: choose text or image to video, set aspect ratio and duration first, write a five-slot prompt (subject, action, environment, light, camera), generate, then score motion, prompt adherence, faces and hands, and value per second, capping yourself at three rolls. Then the durable skill: how to read the Artificial Analysis Video Arena, why the with-audio and without-audio tabs are different rankings, why the top cluster (not rank 3 vs 4) is your candidate pool, and how to break the tie by benching one representative shot across the top two or three. The pitfall: chasing the monthly leader (the HappyHorse stealth-model saga) and torching credits on blind re-rolls.
News (as of 2026-06-03). A quiet week for fresh frontier drops. Alibaba's HappyHorse-1.0 sits atop both boards with its "open weights" still half-released; OpenAI is winding Sora down (app gone in April, API ends September), so migrate to Kling, Veo, or Seedance; ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 holds the value crown with 2.5 reportedly coming. Plus a crowded native-audio race (SkyReels V4, PixVerse V6) and the by-job leaderboard snapshot.
AI-generated podcast by OCDevel. Models and prices move monthly, verify the live leaderboard before quoting any ranking.