“With Sora 2, we are jumping straight to what we think may be the GPT‑3.5 moment for video.”
I think feeling like you need to use that in marketing copy is a pretty good clue in itself both that its not, and that you don’t believe it is so much as desperately wish it would be.
I am looking at the videos and really had a feeling that it looks right (minus a lot of obvious fuck ups still) where previously something felt fundamentally wrong with ai videos. It feels somewhat important, in so far you consider ai generated videos important.
It's the skin textures. It's the slightly better lipsyncing. Maybe it will be different when us normal users get it but so far the demos with Sam don't make him look waxy.
The Sora app squaring off against Meta's social video app is the real story here.
Sora 2 itself looks and sounds a little poorer than Google Veo 3. (Which is itself not currently ranked as the top video model. The Chinese models are dominating.)
I think Google, with their massive YouTube data set, is ultimately going to win this game. They have all the data and infrastructure in the world to build best-in-class video models, and they're just getting started.
The social battle will be something completely different, though. And that's something that I think OpenAI stands a good chance at winning.
Edit: Most companies that are confident of their image or video models stealthily launch it on the Model Arena a week ahead of the public model release. OpenAI did not arrange to do that for Sora 2.
Nano Banana, Seedream/Seedance, Kling, and several other models have followed this pattern of "stealth ELO ranking, then reveal pole position".
https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader...
The fact that this model is about "friends" and "social" implies that this is an underpowered model. You probably saw a cherry picked highlight reel with a large VRAM context, but the actual consumer product will be engineered for efficiency. Built to sustain a high volume of cheap generations, not expensive high quality ones. A product built to face off against Meta. That model compete on the basis of putting you into videos with Pikachu, Mario, and Goku.
> I think Google, with their massive YouTube data set, is ultimately going to win this game.
I don't know, applying the same thinking to LLMs, Google should have been first and best with just text based LLMs too, considering the datasets they sit on (and researchers, among others the people who came up with attention). But OpenAI somehow beat them on that regardless.
The problem for Google existed with the infobox at the top of search results. If users get the answer to their query without having to visit the web page where the answer came from, and where Google shows the ads, means that users don't see ads, and that website operators don't get ad revenue. ChatGPT was Google's Kodak digital camera moment. They had internal transformers-based chatbots (that really wanted to send you pizza, for some reason), but deploying that would have cannibalized their existing business model, so in the meanwhile, their lunch got eaten by an outside competitor.