OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model

[Prompt: A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.]

Wrote Emma Roth in The Verge:

OpenAI is launching a new video-generation model, and it's called Sora.

The AI company says Sora "can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions."

The text-to-video model allows users to create photorealistic videos up to a minute long — all based on prompts they've written.

Sora is capable of creating "complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background," according to OpenAI's introductory blog post.

The company also notes that the model can understand how objects "exist in the physical world," as well as "accurately interpret props and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions."

The model can also generate a video based on a still image, as well as fill in missing frames on an existing video or extend it.

The Sora-generated demos included in OpenAI's blog post include an aerial scene of California during the gold rush, a video that looks as if it were shot from the inside of a Tokyo train, and others.

Many have some telltale signs of AI — like a suspiciously moving floor in a video of a museum — and OpenAI says the model "may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene," but the results are overall pretty impressive.

That is the understatement of the year.