How Sora Works (And What It Means)

Look, here’s what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to freak out. We’re not going to prognosticate about utopia or predict doom. We’re going to keep our heads on straight and…

DID YOU FREAKING SEE SORA????

OpenAI’s new text-to-video model can generate a 60-second photorealistic video of a pair of adorable golden retrievers podcasting on a mountain top. It can generate a video of Bling Zoo, where a tiger lazes in an enclosure littered with emeralds and a capuchin monkey wears a king’s crown behind a gilded cage. It can generate a video of an AI Italian grandmother wearing a pink floral apron and making gnocchi in a rustic kitchen. (Her hands look a little like the hot dog fingers from Everything Everywhere All at Once, but still—that’s a movie, too!)

It’s wild. It’s incredible. It caused Mr. Beast to tweet at Sam Altman: “Please don’t make me homeless.”

There’s a line from a Chekhov story that reads, “I understood it as I understand lightning.” He might as well have been talking about Sora. The demos struck me bodily, like electricity.

Phew. I’m glad I got that out of my system. It was important to say that because writing about a buzzy new drop from OpenAI is a little bit like sailing between a Scylla and Charybdis of the mind:

Meme format inspired by Visakan Veerasamy.In one part of my brain are the multi-headed dragons of doom telling me to strafe the freaking data centers before the movie industry combusts like Mel Gibson’s career. In another part is the techno-optimistic quantum whirlpool of excitement already planning the Pixar-style movie I will create as soon as I get my hands on this model. The world will finally see me as the undiscovered heir to George Lucas that I secretly always knew that I was—lack of ever having made a film be damned.

The problem is, I know both parts of my brain are wrong. Ayyy lmao.

My brain is mistaking newness for something that it’s not. The feeling I’m getting from watching these demos is not the one I get from watching a great movie, YouTube video, or TikTok. Why? I know, in time, the newness of these demos will fade, and they’ll become normal—mundane, even. I’ll no longer get excited by them. But a well-crafted movie will continue to be compelling.

The best way to keep a level head about advances like these is to think of them in terms of long-term trends. Sora in particular, and AI filmmaking in general, is an extension of two important ones: