OpenAI finally launched Sora, but there are limitations

Well, it’s been a long enough wait, but OpenAI finally launched its AI video generator. Named Sora, this video generator is expected to usher in a new era for AI video. Well, as part of 12 Days of “Ship-mas”, OpenAI officially launched Sora to the masses.

So far, OpenAI has announced some rather interesting stuff as part of this event. On Thursday, the company announced some new payment models and a new payment tier. It officially released o1, its most powerful reasoning model. Not only that, but OpenAI launched the new $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription. This gives you access to the most powerful version of o1, unlimited access to other models, and other perks.

OpenAI finally launched Sora

It’s been a long nine months since OpenAI shocked the world with its first Sora sneak peek. That showed us what real video generation was, and it only made us savvy to what was to come. Since then, numerous AI-generated videos started popping up all over social media feeds from other tools. We’ve all see the videos of ice cream scoops turning into puppies.

Well, we’re going to see an explosion of these video clips, as Sora is now on the market. OpenAI held a livestream where it unleashed this tool onto the market. Since video generation is rather heavy on the company’s servers, there are some pretty tight restrictions.

Firstly, and this should come as no surprise, you can’t use Sora if you’re on the free ChatGPT tier. You’ll need to have a ChatGPT Plus subscription, and OpenAI has the vice clamped pretty tightly on this tier. You can generate 50 videos each month at up to 720p resolution. They can be up to five seconds long. This gives you a taste of what Sora has to offer.

If you want more freedom, you’ll need to pony up $180 more each month. A ChatGPT Pro subscription lets you generate unlimited videos up to at 1080p resolution, and they can be up to 20 seconds long. Still, not long enough to make that short film you’ve been dreaming up, but better.

You’ll also get access to 500 priority generations each month. This means that you won’t have to wait in a queue. Not only that, but you’ll be able to download your videos without a watermark and generate up to five videos at once.

Turbo-charged

Among the announcement, OpenAI also introduced us to Sora Turbo. This is a newer and more powerful model that can do things like animating images, remixing videos, and extending forwards and backwards in time. This is a much more powerful model than the one we saw earlier this year, but that shouldn’t surprise you much.