AI movie making is here
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has now unveiled Sora, its artificial intelligence engine for converting text prompts into video. Think Dall-E (also developed by OpenAI), but for movies rather than static images.
It’s still very early days for Sora, but the AI model is already generating a lot of buzz on social media, with multiple clips doing the rounds – clips that look as if they’ve been put together by a team of actors and filmmakers.
Here we’ll explain everything you need to know about OpenAI Sora: what it’s capable of, how it works, and when you might be able to use it yourself. The era of AI text-prompt filmmaking has now arrived.OpenAI Sora release date and price
In February 2024, OpenAI Sora was made available to « red teamers » – that’s people whose job it is to test the security and stability of a product. OpenAI has also now invited a select number of visual artists, designers, and movie makers to test out the video generation capabilities and provide feedback.
« We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon, » says OpenAI.
In other words, the rest of us can’t use it yet. For the time being there’s no indication as to when Sora might become available to the wider public, or how much we’ll have to pay to access it.
We can make some rough guesses about timescale based on what happened with ChatGPT. Before that AI chatbot was released to the public in November 2022, it was preceded by a predecessor called InstructGPT earlier that year. Also, OpenAI’s DevDay typically takes place annually in November.
It’s certainly possible, then, that Sora could follow a similar pattern and launch to the public at a similar time in 2024. But this is currently just speculation and we’ll update this page as soon as we get any clearer indication about a Sora release date.
As for price, we similarly don’t have any hints of how much Sora might cost. As a guide, ChatGPT Plus – which offers access to the newest Large Language Models (LLMs) and Dall-E – currently costs $20 (about £16 / AU$30) per month.
But Sora also demands significantly more compute power than, for example, generating a single image with Dall-E, and the process also takes longer. So it still isn’t clear exactly how well Sora, which is effectively a research paper, might convert into an affordable consumer product.What is OpenAI Sora?
You may well be familiar with generative AI models – such as Google Gemini for text and Dall-E for images – which can produce new content based on vast amounts of training data. If you ask ChatGPT to write you a poem, for example, what you get back will be based on lots and lots of poems that the AI has already absorbed and analyzed.
OpenAI Sora is a similar idea, but for video clips. You give it a text prompt, like « woman walking down a city street at night » or « car driving through a forest » and you get back a video.
