With Sora, OpenAI highlights the mystery and clarity of its mission
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Last Thursday, OpenAI released a demo of its new text-to-video model Sora, that “can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.”
Perhaps you’ve seen one, two or 20 examples of the video clips OpenAI provided, from the litter of golden retriever puppies popping their heads out of the snow to the couple walking through the bustling Tokyo street. Maybe your reaction was wonder and awe, or anger and disgust, or worry and concern — depending on your view of generative AI overall.
Personally, my reaction was a mix of amazement, uncertainty and good old-fashioned curiosity. Ultimately I, and many others, want to know — what is the Sora release really about?
Here’s my take: With Sora, OpenAI offers what I think is a perfect example of the company’s pervasive air of mystery around its constant releases, particularly just three months after CEO Sam Altman’s firing and quick comeback. That enigmatic aura feeds the hype around each of its announcements.
Of course, OpenAI is not “open.” It offers closed, proprietary models, which makes its offerings mysterious by design. But think about it — millions of us are now trying to parse every word around the Sora release, from Altman and many others. We wonder or opine on how the black-box model really works, what data it was trained on, why it was suddenly released now, what it will really be used for, and the consequences of its future development on the industry, the global workforce, society at large, and the environment. All for a demo that will not be released as a product anytime soon — it’s AI hype on steroids.
At the same time, Sora also exemplifies the very un-mysterious, transparent clarity OpenAI has around its mission to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) and ensure that it “benefits all of humanity.”
After all, OpenAI said it is sharing Sora’s research progress early “to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon.” The title of the Sora technical report, “Video generation models as world simulators ,” shows that this is not a company looking to simply release a text-to-video model for creatives to work with. Instead, this is clearly AI researchers doing what AI researchers do — pushing against the edges of the frontier. In OpenAI’s case, that push is towards AGI, even if there is no agreed-upon definition of what that means.
That strange duality — the mysterious alchemy of OpenAI’s current efforts, and unwavering clarity of its long-term mission — often gets overlooked and under-analyzed, I believe, as more of the general public becomes aware of its technology and more businesses sign on to use its products.
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8 个月The article highlights the double-edged sword of OpenAI's Sora: mysterious approach yet transparent mission, soo while generating hype, it fuels public fear over job displacement. The key, however, lies in understanding AI as a tool for efficiency, not just a threat. Sora and similar advancements (Google Gemini, Adobe Firefly) are pushing boundaries, showcasing AI's potential to augment, not replace, human work, this work is crucial to shift the narrative and bridge the gap between feear and excitement about the future of AI.