Sora AI

Sora is OpenAI's text-to-video AI model that creates realistic videos up to 60 seconds long from text prompts. OpenAI positions it as part of broader work on models that can understand and simulate the physical world in motion. 

Sora’s Release Timeline

• Feb 2024: Sora was initially launched as a research project with limited access given to security testers and a group of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers. 

• Nov 2024: A group of these early-access artists leaked the model's API in protest. They claimed they were being used as unpaid R&D workers. OpenAI quickly shut down the leaked access, but the event accelerated public demand.

• Dec 2024: OpenAI officially launched Sora Turbo, a more efficient version, to the ChatGPT Plus and Pro users. 

• Sep 2025: OpenAI released Sora 2, a significantly more advanced model with better physics simulation, along with the iOS app. 

• Nov 2025: Android app released. This, with the iOS app released earlier, marked the transition of Sora into a social platform where creations could be shared and viewed.

What you can do with Sora

1. Generate 60-second long videos from text prompts. Describe a scene (style, setting, characters, camera motion), and Sora produces a video matching the instruction. 

2. Sora can take a still image and generate motion from it, or take an existing video and extend it / fill missing frames. Sora is not a traditional video restoration tool. Instead, it generates new frames by predicting what should happen next based on learned world dynamics.

3. The Sora app lets users remix videos, swap elements, or add scenes. The characters tool creates consistent avatars for self-insertion or sharing with friends (with permission controls available on the iOS and Android apps).

Benefits of Sora

• It reduces the cost of prototyping scenes in filmmaking and advertising.

• It can create high-quality content without a camera crew.

• It can create visual simulations to explain complex concepts in the field of education.

Sora’s Challenges

• Sora can make mistakes. It occasionally struggles with left vs. right and complex cause-and-effect (for example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but the cookie might not have a bite mark afterward).

• Raises deepfake risks, flooding platforms with deceptive content despite disclosure policies.

• Sora faces stiff competition from Google's Veo 3, and xAI's Grok Imagine, an image-to-video tool

• Industry concerns about unlicensed training on copyrighted material, and related lawsuits.

Concerns on Sora's training data