Open Ai’s New Social Media Platform
Unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger) or Elon Musks ‘X’ (previously Twitter), or Zhang Yiming’s Bytedance Douyin (TikTok), or Sundar Pichai’s Alphabet (Google’s Youtube); Sam Altman’s OpenAi didn’t have a social media channel.
Until now…
On 30th September, the new social media product, Sora, was launched in America running on the IOS (Apple) platform. It is free to download and use, and it instantly became one of the fastest downloads ever – over 1 million downloads in less than 5 days.
The heart of the Sora social media platform is OpenAi’s new video generator, Sora2, that allows users to create and share videos using what used to be called ‘avators’ but are now known by OpenAi as ‘Cameos’. These are images generated by users and made available to friends (and others) via the Sora social media app.
Any of these cameos can be included in videos you create by using additional text prompts, so it would be possible to put yourself (and your friends) into a fictitious scene – maybe shaking hands with Sam Altman whilst standing on the moon.
Some of the creations I’ve seen have been both wild and bordering on offensive. I can imagine that possible legal actions might begin to choke some of the currently available options within the software. Sam Altman himself describes it as a bit of an experiment to see what happens – and that will probably determine how it develops – I’m sure he’s right. We’ll see.
None of which should take away anything from the abilities of Sora 2.
Its a staggeringly good video generator (just look at this clip) that, like Google Veo3 (and their latest Veo3.1), includes lip-syncing and audio from simple text prompts.
Access to the more fully featured Sora2-Pro requires either a top end OpenAi ($200/month) account, or access through one of the many platforms that have now utilised API access. That squarely places it in the same price bracket as Googles Veo3, and again sets the bar for video generation. https://openai.com/index/sora-2/
One of the impressive improvements of the newer video generators is their understanding of physics, such as gravity and fluid dynamics. That means that objects move and interact as they would in the real world. For example, a ball dropping and bouncing correctly, water pouring into a glass and changing colour, or a cinematic shot that follows physical rules of motion and composition.
These advancements allow for greater realism, moving beyond just visual similarity to a more physically-simulated output.
If you are interested in getting more involved in Ai for film making, or even Ai generally, please contact me at jim@surreyborder.org.uk and visit the new dedicated Ai website, aiveo.uk
Much of the content is built using thebrain software, making searching much more visual and dynamic.
There are exciting times ahead!
BTW. All these images were generated by Sora-2 – Click here to see their video