Sora Is the Most Hyped Bot Since ChatGPT - The Atlantic
Remember Sora? For more than two years, every new AI announcement has lived in the shadow of ChatGPT. No model from any company has eclipsed or matched that initial fever. But perhaps the closest any firm has come to replicating the buzz was this past February, when OpenAI first teased its video-generating AI model, Sora. Tantalizing clips—woolly mammoths kicking up clouds of snow, Pixar-esque animations of adorable fluffy critters—promised a stunning future, one in which anyone can whip up high-quality clips by typing simple text prompts into a computer program.
OpenAI's Response
But Sora, which was not immediately available to the public, remained just that: a teaser. Pressure on OpenAI has mounted. In the intervening months, several other major tech companies, including Meta, Google, and Amazon, have showcased video-generating models of their own. Today, OpenAI finally responded. “This is a launch we’ve been excited for for a long time,” the start-up’s CEO, Sam Altman, said in an announcement video. “We’re going to launch Sora, our video product.”
In the announcement, the company said that paid subscribers to ChatGPT in the United States and several other countries will be able to use Sora to generate videos of their own. Unlike other tech companies’ video-generating models, which remain previews or are available solely through enterprise cloud platforms, Sora is the first video-generating product that a major tech company is placing directly in users’ hands.
Commercial Focus
OpenAI’s key word this afternoon was product. The company is billing Sora not as a research breakthrough but as a consumer experience—part of the company’s ongoing commercial lurch. At its founding, in 2015, OpenAI was a nonprofit with a mission to build digital intelligence “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” Today, it pumps out products and business deals like any other tech company chasing revenue.
The Impact of Sora
Already, videos that OpenAI staff and early-access users generated with Sora are trickling onto social media, and a deluge from users the world over will follow. For more than two years, cheap and easy-to-use generative-AI models have turned everybody into a potential illustrator; soon, anybody might become an animator as well. That poses an obvious threat for human illustrators and animators, many of whom have long been sounding the alarm against generative AI taking their livelihood.
Expressing Online
What the mass adoption of video-generating AI products could meaningfully change is how people express themselves online. Over the past year, AI-generated memes, cartoons, caricatures, and other images, sometimes called “slop,” have saturated the internet. This content, much of it clearly generated by AI rather than intended to deceive—a medium of crude self-expression, not sophisticated subterfuge—may have been the technology’s biggest impact on the 2024 presidential election.
The Future of Sora
Sora’s takeover of the web is not guaranteed. Back in May, Tim Brooks, another Sora researcher who has since joined Google, likened the program’s current state to GPT-1, the earliest version of the programs underlying ChatGPT, which are currently in their fourth generation. OpenAI repeated the analogy today. That comparison has broken down as the company has become more and more profit-driven: GPT-1 was highly preliminary research, a concept before a proof of concept, and four years removed from the release of ChatGPT. Sora might be just as undeveloped as an avenue for AGI, but it has become a full-fledged product nearly 10 months after OpenAI teased the model.
