OpenAI teases ‘Sora,’ its new text-to-video AI model

Want to see a turtle riding a bike across the ocean? Now, generative AI can animate that scene in seconds.

OpenAI on Thursday unveiled its new text-to-video model Sora, which can generate videos up to a minute long based on whatever prompt a user types into a text box. Though it’s not yet available to the public, the AI company’s announcement roused a frenzy of reactions online.

AI enthusiasts were quick to brainstorm ideas around the potential of this latest technology, even as others raised immediate concern over how its accessibility might erode human jobs and further the spread of digital disinformation.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman solicited prompt ideas on X and generated a series of videos including the aforementioned aquatic cyclists, as well as a cooking video and a couple of dogs podcasting on a mountain.

“We are not making this model broadly available in our products soon,” a spokesperson for OpenAI wrote in an email, adding that the company is sharing its research progress now to gain early feedback from others in the AI community.

The company, with its popular chatbot ChatGPT and text-to-image generator DALL-E, is one of several tech startups leading the generative AI revolution that began in 2022. It wrote in a blog post that Sora can generate with accuracy multiple characters and different types of motion.

“We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction,” OpenAI wrote in the post.

But Sora may struggle to capture the physics or spatial details of a more complex scene, which can lead it to generate something illogical (like a person running in the wrong direction on a treadmill), morph a