“Sora is here.” That’s how OpenAI announced the full roll out of its AI video tool that the company initially unveiled earlier this year.
In Sora, the artificial intelligence innovator says it has created a model that “understands and simulates reality” in its function to create realistic videos based on text commands.
It won’t be available for absolutely everybody, however. Sora is only accessible on launch by people who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus or ChatGPT Pro, and even they will be limited by certain usage and resolution restrictions.
Sora Is Here
Monday’s announcement confirmed that a new version of the software that OpenAI is calling Sora Turbo is available as a standalone product with immediate effect. It has been rolled out everywhere ChatGPT is available, with the exception of the UK, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area.
Sora Turbo allows users to generate videos up to 1080p resolution with a maximum length of 20 seconds. They have the choice of widescreen, vertical, or square aspect ratios.
This just in! View
the top business tech deals for 2025 👨💻
It’s also possible for users to incorporate their own photos and videos to help create prompts for the content that Sora will generate.
“You can bring your own assets to extend, remix, and blend, or generate entirely new content from text.” – OpenAI
A new interface has been revealed with the product launch, with tweaks to the original concept art that OpenAI says will make it easier to prompt. There are also dedicated feeds to Featured and Recent videos that will be populated with the creations of other Sora users.
Features and Restrictions
OpenAI’s main Sora landing page shows a selection of the videos created on Sora, as well as examples of how tweaking prompts can adjust the output.
It also shows how Sora can be used to hone in on individual frames to create videos that better represent the user’s intentions, how multiple videos can be blended into one, and how the community can share animation styles that may benefit other users.
Initially, only ChatGPT Plus ($20 a month) and Pro ($200 a month) subscribers will be able to use Sora. Plus members can generate up to 50 480p resolution videos per month, or fewer if they opt for 720p. The announcement says that the Pro plan includes “10x more usage, higher resolutions, and longer durations.”
OpenAI is working on “tailored pricing” for different users and says it plans to roll this out in early 2025.
A Sight for Sora Eyes
Sora may not be the first AI video generator, but early glimpses suggest that it has raised the bar for what such tools can achieve. Some of the initial impressions have been very positive.
TechRadar, for example, described the results it has seen as “so good it’s made me want to stump up $200 for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro tier” and that “it’s changed everything,” while ‘AI Educator’ Min Choi posted on X that the “video quality looks insane.”
OpenAI has still been careful to downplay Sora’s capabilities, however. It has many limitations, the company says, and “often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.”
“We hope this early version of Sora will enable people everywhere to explore new forms of creativity, tell their stories, and push the boundaries of what’s possible with video storytelling.” – OpenAI
And it’s inevitable that Sora’s full release it will only exacerbate the conversations and debates about the intellectual property rights of professionals, with a group of affronted artists leaking Sora in November in protest of their unpaid labor.
