Sora: Everything You Need To Know About OpenAI's New Generative AI model

Sora is an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. The text-to-video model called Sora is a diffusion model, which generates a video by starting off with one that looks like static noise and gradually transforms it by removing the noise over many steps.

What Is Sora?

Sora a Generative AI model introduced on February 16 2024 -- can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt. Sora can generate complex scenes with multiple scenarios, specific type of motion and accurate details of the main subject and the background. The artificial intelligence model understands not only what the user has prompted, but also how the details exist in the physical world.

Who Created Sora?

Sora was created and publicly announced by OpenAI -- an artificial intelligence research company in February 2024. OpenAI was founded by a group of entrepreneurs and researchers including Elon Musk and Sam Altman in 2015. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft the most notable and by several other investors as Thrive Capital, Micro VC and many others. OpenAI has also created Dall-E and AI text-to-image generator and trained ChatGPT GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 the most recent and powerfull OpenAI model.

How Does Sora Work?

Sora -- works through a diffusion model and uses the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, which uses specialized algorithms to generate a video by starting of with patterns within a video that looks like static noise and gradually transforms it by removing the noise over many steps, in other words could be summarized as: It sees some words, take a video of just static noise like the one in the old TVs and step by step it transforms the video by removing the noise. As described by OpenAI's research,the working flow is summarized in two steps.

1. The dataset of videos and images is represented by smaller units of data called patches, each of which corresponds to a token in GPT. The unification of such data, lets the diffusion transformers be trained on a wider range of visual data spanning different durations, resolutions and aspect ratios.
2. As a result of past research in DALL-E and GPT models, Sora uses recaptioning technique from DALL·E 3, which involves generating highly descriptive captions for the visual training data making the AGI model to follow the user’s text instructions in the generated video more faithfully.

Generating a video solely from text instruction is not all that Sora has to offer, instead the model is able take an existing still image and generate a video from it, animating the image’s contents with accuracy and attention to small detail, finally Sora can also take an existing video and extend it or fill in missing frames.

What Kind Of Tasks Can Users Ask Sora?

Sora can generate variety of videos lasting a minute by users prompts, including simple such as

• "Tour of an art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles." or more complex prompts, such as
• "The camera follows behind a white vintage SUV with a black roof rack as it speeds up a steep dirt road surrounded by pine trees on a steep mountain slope, dust kicks up from it’s tires, the sunlight shines on the SUV as it speeds along the dirt road, casting a warm glow over the scene. The dirt road curves gently into the distance, with no other cars or vehicles in sight. The trees on either side of the road are redwoods, with patches of greenery scattered throughout. The car is seen from the rear following the curve with ease, making it seem as if it is on a rugged drive through the rugged terrain. The dirt road itself is surrounded by steep hills and mountains, with a clear blue sky above with wispy clouds." Sora can animate pictures, which means users can prompt an image and animate it with higher quality up to a minute of lenght. Finally Sora can extends or fill frames of already existings videos that user would prompt.

What Are The Use Cases Of Sora?

Sora can be used for different use cases more than generating imaginative scenes. People can use Sora to resolve the following tasks:

• Create videos based written or visual content without anymore relying on payment sources.
• Teaching historycal events with look a like scenes,
• Create products presentations for businesses,
• Generate videos to entertain,
• Generate ads videos with cinematic effect

What Are The Benefits Of Sora?

While the model has just been announced and not yet launched, finding benefits from using the Generative AI model's Sora potentially depends on the quality of details. Here's some crucial benefits that comes from Sora:

• Multimodal support. Sora can take a text, a video or an image as input, and output a video, animating the static image, extend the video prompted.
• Improves Accessibility for Education. While finding a video representing a situation in a certain historic time, might be difficult with just a detailed prompt in Sora can generate the imaginative scene for students and teachers.
• Cost savings. Sora can help reducing costs for businesses for example for the case of a marketing team of a company, Sora can generate visual content instead of relying on solutions that can costs higher.

What Are The Limitations Of Sora?

Where there are benefits there are also limitations for Sora including the following:

• Safety. While Sora is yet to be released as an available for public OpenAI's product the team is still working with teams experts in domain like misinformation, hateful content, and bias — who will be adversarially testing the model.
• Accuracy. Ideally, Sora would generate a highly detailed video. Instead, current Sora model does not generate perfectly humanlike videos for imaginary scenes.
• Moderation While Sora is set to follow the existing safety methods applied by OpenAI for products that use DALL·E 3, these methods are yet to be applied. Once applied the text classifier will check and reject inappropriate requests. However OpenAI has already developed a robust image classifiers that are used to review the frames of every video generated to help ensure that it adheres to OpenAI's usage policies, before it’s shown to the user.

How To Use Sora?

While Sora has just been announced the model is not yet launched for the public. The OpenAI team will firstly be engaging with engaging policymakers, educators and artists around the world to understand concern and to identify positive use cases for this new technology. We will eventually release updates when Sora will be available for the users.

Sora latest updates

Sora technical paper is set to release on the same day (February 16 2024) Top