Some time ago I wrote a post about the writers’ strike, and what I thought the real threat was, not just to writers, but to the film studios as well.
This past week, my prediction came true, at least in preview, in the form of OpenAI’s Sora. It’s a high-fidelity text-to-video model, which hasn’t been released to the general public yet, since they want to put it through safety checks, and have it vetted by “policymakers, educators and artists around the world.” The videos are currently limited to a duration of up to one minute.
But it is quite astounding.
The production values are shockingly good, and the spareness of the prompts (“Historical footage of California during the gold rush” or even the more robust “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”) do not seem worthy of the videos that are produced.
It is an open question, at this point, as to how much detail one will need to include in the prompt to get this kind of production value. It is also a question as to what it will take to modify these videos in one direction or another. But the examples themselves are mind-bending.
So much so, in fact, that Tyler Perry put an $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI’s Sora, saying “Being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing.”
This was, in my view, a very smart decision, and a recognition of the tsunami that is gathering before the entire industry. Sam Altman recently said that he thought the time will come when one person creates a billion dollar company. That time too will soon be upon us.