A music video (Music) produced by Sora released by the official account of OpenAI Video) - "Worldweight", which aroused many onlookers from netizens. It is understood that the music for this "Worldweight" was composed by artist August Kamp composed the music and the video was created with the help of Sora.
With August In Kamp's own words, "The worldweight in my mind finally has a concrete visual effect. ”
|Sora is taking the global film and game industry by storm
On March 26, OpenAI and a group of artists jointly launched the first professional-level art short film "Aerial Dreamer" created by Sora, which successfully constructed a complete narrative structure compared to the previously released 60-second clip. Just the day before, on March 25, a number of media revealed that OpenAI will hold talks with Hollywood film and television companies and media executives in Los Angeles this week. Through this meeting, OpenAI hopes to deepen its partnership with Hollywood and actively promote the practical application of Sora technology in the filmmaking process by filmmakers, thereby accelerating the pace of integration with the entertainment and cultural industry.
At the same time, OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Muratti, recently announced in a media interview that Sora is expected to be available to the public as soon as this year, and is expected to integrate video and sound support in future versions.
This indicates that once Sora is officially released, this text-to-video tool will accelerate the integration with multiple industries such as film, television, and games. It is worth noting that the famous Hollywood director Taylor Perry, after watching the video produced by Sora, even said that he was so impressed by the innovative technology that he considered suspending the expansion of his film and television studios up to $800 million.
|What is so strong about Sora?
Sora is essentially an undisclosed innovation of GPT5.0, a powerful generative language model, for video applications. Although there are already companies such as Runway, Pika, Genmo, and Stable Video Among the more than 21 publicly available AI video models, including Diffusion, Sora still stands out with four breakthrough features that have attracted widespread attention in the industry: first, it significantly extends the duration of AI-generated videos from the usual 4 seconds to 60 seconds, second, it ensures the internal logic and continuity of the content within these 60 seconds, third, it achieves an artistic expression similar to video storyboarding, and finally, it reaches a new level of realism in simulating real-world behavior.
At present, since Sora is still private, it is mainly compared with existing tools such as Pika, both inside and outside the industry. For example, in the face of complex text instructions such as "Hayao Miyazaki-style, depicting a couple walking through the snow-covered streets of China on Valentine's Day with roses in hand and umbrellas together", Pika generated only 4 seconds of video clips in one minute, and often found that key elements such as roses and umbrellas were missing, making it difficult to accurately match the specified painting style, let alone show the smooth interaction between characters and between characters and animals, and the actual effect was closer to a dynamic GIF than a continuous video.
In contrast, the video samples shown by Sora are obviously superior in terms of element integrity, closeness of painting style, and scene narration ability, not only can you switch between far and near scenes freely, but also can weave a picture with a certain storyline, and the video quality has reached the standard of HD 1080P.
Sora's potential impact on film and television special effects production has been revolutionary. One impressive example is Sora's demonstration of a special effects shot of a flower breaking down and transforming into a tiger, complex visual effects that can cost hundreds of thousands of yuan or even millions of yuan if produced by a traditional film team.
From the perspective of labor costs, the head of a video post-production company pointed out that even a relatively simple commercial video requires a production team of about 10 people to work together, while the production of film and television series is larger, often with hundreds of participants. However, Sora has the potential to take on multiple types of work, greatly reducing the manpower requirements.
As the forefront of the application of AI technology, many industry insiders have high hopes and made specific predictions. They believe that Sora will deeply reshape the video resource production process of the entire industry. Traditional professional video production usually has to go through many tedious and delicate steps such as script creation, actor modeling and makeup, lighting and camera setup, and post-production. With the rise of AIGC tools like Sora, these traditional processes will be transformed. For example, game characters can be presented in the form of digital humans or a combination of real people and digital humans, using AIGC technology to create a variety of scene layouts, and even breaking the constraints of real conditions to achieve high-end special effects.
Domestic enterprises are accelerating their layout
At present, leading companies in various industries are actively accelerating the pace of practical application of AI technology, and the performance of the game industry is particularly eye-catching and at the forefront. In recent years, the application of AI technology in the field of domestic game production has become more and more extensive, although the current proportion of total game production business handled by AI is only 10% to 20%, but this proportion is growing rapidly, indicating that AI will be used on a larger scale in the future.
Tencent, for example, launched its self-developed cutting-edge gaming AI engine "GiiNEX" on March 20. This engine integrates generative AI and decision-making AI technologies, targeting a variety of application scenarios such as NPC intelligence, scene construction, and automatic content generation, covering a series of AIGC functions from 2D graphics and animation production, to 3D city modeling, story arrangement, dialogue system, level design, and music creation, which has effectively improved the work efficiency of game developers in producing high-quality content, and has been successfully implemented in Tencent's game "Yuan Dream Star".
At the same time, a number of listed companies revealed that although the technology and application of Sora-related technology are still in their infancy, various companies are actively carrying out research and plan to combine their respective business characteristics to find breakthroughs in the practical application of Wensheng video technology and the innovation and expansion of Sora technology.
It is worth noting that the competition in AI technology is ultimately a battle for computing power. With the rise of generative AI, the demand for computing power has skyrocketed. Research by Huaxi Securities shows that compared with the computing power required for the training of the traditional large language model Transformer architecture, the computing power required by the Sora architecture in the training process is nearly 100 times different, highlighting the huge challenges to hardware facilities and computing resources behind the progress of AI technology.
Where are the relevant investment opportunities?
In March, Alibaba Group played a key role in the large-scale financing of MiniMax, a new generation of general-purpose large-scale model project. Prior to this, MiniMax has attracted the attention and capital injection of many well-known investment institutions such as Tencent, miHoYo, Mingshi Capital, Hillhouse Venture Capital and IDG Capital.
The Sora Concept Index, which reflects the popularity of the market, has been rising from 1247.3 points on February 20 to reaching a recent peak of 1822.66 points on March 22, showing that investors in the primary and secondary markets are highly eager for high-quality investment projects.
From the perspective of technology research and development trends, the birth of Sora technology can be called a major breakthrough in the field of AI in the field of video creation, and its emergence has greatly raised the entry threshold for text-driven video generation startups. As a result, some startup teams may adjust their strategic direction to adapt to the new technological environment. This year's investment landscape is expected to be more focused on strategic investors rather than investors who are simply looking for financial returns. Startups rooted in advertising and marketing, short video creation, film and television production, game development, and other fields are expected to attract more capital injections if they can make full use of AI technology to achieve deep integration with these industries. In particular, startups have great growth opportunities when they deeply understand the real pain points of the content industry and provide targeted application solutions, efficient tools, smooth workflows, or advanced technical services.
