OpenAI releases Sora, its buzzy AI video-generation tool

OpenAI said Monday it’s releasing its buzzy AI video-generation tool, Sora, later in the day.

The AI video-generation model works similarly to OpenAI’s image-generation AI tool, DALL-E: A user types out a desired scene, and Sora will return a high-definition video clip. Sora can also generate video clips inspired by still images and extend existing videos or fill in missing frames. The Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup, which burst into the mainstream last year thanks to the viral popularity of ChatGPT, introduced Sora in February.

It’ll debut to U.S. users as well as to “most countries internationally” later today, according to OpenAI’s YouTube livestream, and the company has “no timeline” yet for launching the tool in Europe and the U.K., as well as some other countries.

OpenAI said users don’t need to pay extra for the tool, which will be included in existing ChatGPT accounts such as Plus and Pro. Employees on the livestream and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated features like “Blend” (i.e., joining two scenes together at the user’s direction), as well as the option to make an AI-generated video endlessly repeat.

Until now, Sora has mainly been available to a small group of safety testers, or “red-teamers,” who test the model for vulnerabilities in areas such as misinformation and bias.

Reddit users asked OpenAI executives in October about Sora’s release date, questioning whether it was being delayed “due to the amount of compute/time required for inference or due to safety.” In response, OpenAI’s product chief Kevin Weil wrote, “Need to perfect the model, need to get safety/impersonation/other things right, and need to scale compute!”

“We obviously have a big target on our back as OpenAI, so we want to prevent legal activity of Sora, but we also want to balance that with creative expression,” Rohan Sahai, OpenAI’s Sora product lead, said on the livestream.

OpenAI closed its latest funding round in October at a valuation of $157 billion, including the $6.6 billion the company raised from an extensive roster of investment firms and Big Tech companies. It also received a $4 billion revolving line of credit, bringing its total liquidity to more than $10 billion.

It’s all part of a serious growth plan for OpenAI, as the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup battles Amazon-backed Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon for the biggest slice of the generative AI market, which is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Earlier this month, OpenAI hired its first chief marketing officer, indicating plans to spend more on marketing to grow its user base. And in October, OpenAI debuted a search feature within ChatGPT that positions it to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft‘s Bing and Perplexity and may attract more users who otherwise visited those sites to search the web.

With Sora, the ChatGPT maker is looking to compete with video-generation AI tools from companies such as Meta and Google, which announced Lumiere in January. Similar AI tools are available from other startups, such as Stability AI’s Stable Video Diffusion. Amazon has also released Create with Alexa, a model that specializes in generating prompt-based short-form animated children’s content.

Video could be the next frontier for generative AI now that chatbots and image generators have made their way into the consumer and business world. While the creative opportunities will excite some AI enthusiasts, the new technologies present serious misinformation concerns as major political elections occur across the globe. The number of AI-generated deepfakes created has increased 900% year over year, according to data from Clarity, a machine learning firm.

OpenAI has made multimodality — the combining of text, image and video generation — a prominent goal in its effort to offer a broader suite of AI models.

News of Sora’s release follows protestors’ decision to leak what appeared to be a copy of Sora over concerns about the ChatGPT maker’s treatment of artists.

Some members of OpenAI’s early access program for Sora, which it said included about 300 artists, published an open letter in late November critiquing OpenAI for not being sufficiently open or supporting the arts beyond marketing.

“Dear corporate AI overlords,” the protestors’ open letter stated, “We received access to Sora with the promise to be early testers, red teamers and creative partners. However, we believe instead we are being lured into ‘art washing’ to tell the world that Sora is a useful tool for artists.”

The letter added that hundreds of artists provided unpaid labor for OpenAI through bug testing and feedback on Sora, and that “while hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.”

“We are not against the use of AI technology as a tool for the arts (if we were, we probably wouldn’t have been invited to this program),” the open letter stated. “What we don’t agree with is how this artist program has been rolled out and how the tool is shaping up ahead of a possible public release. We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts.”

In late November, an OpenAI spokesperson responded to the protestors’ actions in a statement to CNBC.

“Hundreds of artists in our alpha have shaped Sora’s development, helping prioritize new features and safeguards,” the OpenAI spokesperson said at the time. “Participation is voluntary, with no obligation to provide feedback or use the tool. We’ve been excited to offer these artists free access and will continue supporting them through grants, events, and other programs.”