People in the United States can now use an artificial intelligence video generator of OpenAI called Sora which will be made publicly available on Monday (Dec 9).
In February, OpenAI first presented Sora but at that time it was accessible to only select filmmakers, artists and safety testers.
After the announcement of Sora on Monday (Dec 9), the website of OpenAI did not allow new sign-ups because of heavy traffic.
What is Sora?
Sora is a text-to-video generator tool which is capable of creating AI video clips on the basis of the written prompts of a user.
For example, the website of OpenAI had the prompt of “a wide, serene shot of a family of woolly mammoths in an open desert”.
The video generated from this prompt showed a group of three extinct creatures who were walking slowly through sand dunes.
“We hope this early version of Sora will enable people everywhere to explore new forms of creativity, tell their stories, and push the boundaries of what’s possible with video storytelling,” wrote OpenAI in a blog post.
OpenAI is famous for creating the popular chatbot ChatGPT but also has its branches in other forms of generative AI.
The platform works on a voice-cloning tool and has integrated the image generation tool Dall-E into the functions of ChatGPT. The AI market is being led by this Microsoft-backed company and it is now valued at around $160 billion.
Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee was allowed to test the tool by OpenAI ahead of Sora’s release. He stated that the results were “horrifying and inspiring at the same time”.
Redditers discuss the launch of OpenAI
In October, Reddit users asked OpenAI executives about the release date of Sora and asked whether the launch was being delayed “due to the amount of compute/time required for inference or due to safety.”
OpenAI’s product chief Kevin Weil in his response said, “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,” Rohan Sahai, OpenAI’s Sora product lead, said on the live stream, and added that illegal use of the technology needs to be prevented by the company. “But we also want to balance that with creative expression,” he said.
(With inputs from agencies)