Sora breaks OpenAI
Meltdown indicates demand for AI video
OpenAI opened up its video-generation engine Sora to paid users two days ago, but immediately ran into problems that have now apparently engulfed its core product ChatGPT.
There were so many people wanting to generate video, OpenAI had to stop creation of new Sora accounts almost immediately. The boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said on X they were working on a fix, but the situation has degenerated further with countries already on the green-list, like Australia, now apparently excluded from the video functionality.
As of midday Australian eastern time Friday, ChatGPT no longer works and is reported on the OpenAI site as experiencing a major outage.
The Sora.com site loads extremely slowly and can’t display videos or thumbnails (“Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.”)
Looks like OpenAI called down a classic denial-of-service attack on itself.
This failure to anticipate demand seems incompetent on OpenAI’s behalf. The launch of ChatGPT, the groundbreaking language AI, was followed by one of the fastest uptakes in tech history. Two months on from launch in late 2022, it had 100m users. It now has more than 300m weekly users.
Given that users have been asking for access to the closed-beta Sora for the best part of the year, it would have been prudent to have plenty of capacity online for the launch.
At the moment very few people know how good Sora is, and there are plenty of paid subscribers, like me, who are very keen to get hands on. If this is a compelling video creation tool, the current price of a ChatGPT paid subscription (US$20 a month) looks like incredible value.
What’s so good about Sora?
That’s the question everyone wants to answer for themselves.
The influential tech Youtuber Marques Brownlee described the latest version of Sora as “both horrifying and inspiring.”
Nine months ago, when Sora was announced, we could only see videos that had already been filtered by OpenAI. They looked amazing, but when you don’t get to see all the failed videos, you can’t judge the quality of a generator.
Brownlee says the system has strengths and weaknesses, but overall “this is a powerful tool that is about to be in the hands of millions of people.”
Well, it was about to be in the hands of millions. How soon that will happen depends on the frantic engineers at OpenAI.
For an indication of the potential, see Brownlee’s review and keep checking Sora.com for yourself.
Who needs to create video?
A lot of technological development is fuelled by products people had no idea they needed until they started using them. Steve Jobs said: “It's not the customer's job to know what they want.”
I think video generation is a classic unknown desire. Seeing is believing, and being able to create, on demand, believable but 100 percent synthetic video is going to change the world.
It’s clear from Brownlee’s video that Sora isn’t there yet. But it sure looks better to me than Runway and the some of the other video generation tools out there.
Apologies for such a short post - this is a breaking news situation with ChatGPT being down. If anything big develops, I’ll get back to you. I look forward to giving you my own Sora rundown in due course.
Have a great weekend,
Hal
Hey, great read as always. Your take on the self-inflicted DoS from underprovisioning is spot-on. Was hoping to try Sora for some cycling route videos. A pretty basic miscalculation.
I've tried it and found it underwhelming. The security features are almost laughably bad - it took about 5 minutes to manipulate the video outside Sora. Yet it has OpenAI's watermark. Video producers will be lining up behind writers and artists to join class-action lawsuits, IMO.