OpenAI’s hyper realistic AI video generator Sora launches

Popular tech reviewing YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as his handle MKHBD, has broken the news that OpenAI will release its hyperrealistic AI video generation software Sora today — nearly 10 months after it was first shown off publicly in February 2024.

“The rumors are true – SORA, OpenAI’s AI video generator, is launching for the public today…” Brownlee wrote in a post on the social network X.

He also shared a thread of examples of videos he made using the text/image/video-to-video generator, which he was given early access to, one among several dozen early creative partners OpenAI seeded the program to before general release.

Brownlee shared that while Sora could produce impressive and sometimes eerily realistic footage such as that of newscasters or a gadget reviewer like himself, it also tends to halluciante random details and tell-tale signs of being AI generated, such as garbled, nonsensical text in news chyrons, unnatural physics, and even adding or removing objects seemingly at random.

He also noted that OpenAI imposes fairly strict guardrails against generating likenesses of real people and violence and explicit themes.

Still, in his full YouTube review, he also ultimately concluded that “this is a lot for humanity to digest now… is the new baseline, this is once again the worst that it will ever be.”

While OpenAI itself has not released Sora to the public yet, based on MKBHD’s review, the software will likely be available within hours — following the third in OpenAI’s “12 Days of OpenAI” series of holiday-themed announcements scheduled for 1 pm ET / 10 am ET.

It’s unclear at this time how much Sora will cost and whether it will be available as a stand-alone product or bundled with an OpenAI ChatGPT subscription tier, such as the $200-per-month per user ChatGPT Pro plan announced last Thursday.

The release follows a leak of Sora onto the AI code sharing community Hugging Face by beta testers roughly two weeks ago in protest of OpenAI’s handling of the beta testing program. As the leakers wrote on their Hugging Face space:

“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company. 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.”

Sora also arrives in the midst of an increasingly competitive landscape for realistic, live action AI video generation: Runway continues to upgrade its AI video generation platform rapidly with new features including, just last week, the ability to re-record dialog in pre-existing footage and have the characters’ faces match. Luma AI and Chinese competitors such as Kling, Hailuo, and recently, Tencent, have all fielded impressive AI video generation tools in the last few weeks alone.

So even though OpenAI — by virtue of its success with ChatGPT and early, eye-catching Sora footage — may have strong recognition with which to launch this new AI video generator to the masses, there are now many competing options that appear, at least superficially, to offer similar or better video quality. That makes Sora less of a guaranteed success.