🧙🏼 OpenAI's Sora is here!

Howdy, wizards.

The second day of OpenAI’s shipmas did not disappoint…

Here’s what’s brewing in AI today.

DARIO’S PICKS

1. At last—OpenAI launches Sora

As the title says—OpenAI launched Sora today, on Sora.com. It can do text to video, image to video and even video to video. They’ve launched not just a model here, but rather a studio for AI video production.

Key features:

• The explore feed: Sora has its own public gallery of user-created videos that you can draw inspiration from or even remix. See featured, recent or saved videos.

• Storyboard: Arrange and organize video sequences visually on a timeline.

• Remix: Replace, remove, or re-imagine elements in your or other peoples’ videos to transform scenes and settings.

• Re-cut: Find the best frames and adjust scene lengths for a polished final cut.

• Loop: Create seamless, repeating video clips.

• Blend: Merge two videos into one cohesive clip.

• Style presets: Apply stylistic templates to give your videos a thematic look.

Sora is available to paid ChatGPT subscribers in many countries, but not most of Europe and the UK for now.

You’ll need to set up your own account on the Sora website, and if you’re a ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscriber, you can connect your OpenAI account directly when signing up.

Here’s what you get from Sora at ChatGPT’s Plus and Pro tiers:

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Sora’s interface offers a fully intuitive, studio-like experience—very reminiscent of ChatGPT, but for video content. Seems like the OpenAI team did a solid job on this one; Altman also made an analogy during the livestream of Sora being like “GPT-1”, meaning it’s likely to get a lot better with each upgrade. I’m so excited to start using it.

Also – OpenAI made their Pro plan way more attractive to serious content creators with this. They’re a fully fledged Runway competitor now. Many of those looking to use Sora commercially will likely get swayed by 10x more usage, top resolution and no watermark as part of the Pro subscription. Kinda sucks for casual users, but as a business move it probably makes sense.

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DARIO’S PICKS

2. xAI leaked an amazingly good image generator, then removed it

Grok, the chatbot of Elon Musk’s xAI platform, got a new image model this weekend: Aurora.

From the images people managed to generate with it, it seems capable of generating very realistic images (possible better than Flux) and has lack of restrictions when it comes to generating images of pretty much anything—except nudes.

However, quickly after the release it was taken down with Musk tweeting: “This is our internal image generation system. Still in beta, but it will improve fast.”

xAI instead launched another model now, Grok 2 + FLUX beta, which seemingly has more restrictions when it comes to generate copyrighted images.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ People are speculating how xAI managed to build a new image generator on the level of Aurora so fast. We know xAI has a partnership with Black Forest Labs, makers of Flux—is that where their internal model comes from? Or is this the work of their 100,000 GPU supercluster? Or maybe a combination? We just don’t know at this point.

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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