OpenAI's Sora Video Generator AI Will Be Available in a Matter of Months

OpenAI's Sora video-generating bot made waves when it was announced in February, but only a few designers and filmmakers have been able to use it. OpenAI promised a full release in the future, and the wait might not be as long as we believed. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati says that Sora could be ready for the public in a matter of months.

The debut of Sora last month swept away the generative AI malaise we all felt from seeing a dozen almost identical chatbots hit the scene. Sora wasn't doing anything new—numerous text-to-video products are already available. However, Sora's videos look real. It can create photorealistic scenes or imitate styles like 3D animation and cartoons. The output is so impressive that the film industry is feeling the heat. Filmmaker Tyler Perry reportedly axed an $800 million expansion of his studio after seeing how far Sora had taken AI video.

By limiting access to trusted partners, OpenAI hopes it can ready Sora for a safe public release. Rooting for Sora to be released as soon as possible is probably a bad idea. It's possible to use text and image-based generative AI systems for malicious purposes. Still, a service that creates realistic videos from scratch could be abused with even graver consequences, particularly as the US careens toward what promises to be a tumultuous election season. Murati does note that the final version of Sora probably won't be able to recreate public figures.

OpenAI shared some new video with the WSJ, including one of a mermaid reviewing a smartphone. Credit: OpenAI

The WSJ also asked Murati about the data used to train Sora. With ChatGPT, the company famously fed its algorithm almost every scrap of text on the internet. The company vacuumed up so much text that it's being sued by The New York Times for infringing its copyright. Murati kept her statement vague, saying only that it involved "publicly available data and licensed data." Shutterstock was one of the licensing partners.

As OpenAI works toward releasing Sora, it is also trying to reduce its compute usage. Currently, Sora is much more expensive to run than the company's other AI products. It hopes to bring costs down closer to the Dall-e image-generating bot. If it can't slim down Sora, OpenAI might end up charging a premium for access. It's also working to add sound to Sora videos, which will only make the compute costs higher.