OpenAI announced on Monday that it will release its popular AI video generation tool, Sora, later today.

The AI ​​video generation model works similarly to OpenAI’s image generation AI tool, DALL-E: a user enters a desired scene and Sora returns a high-resolution video clip. Sora can also create video clips inspired by still images and expand existing videos or fill in missing frames. The Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence startup, which entered the mainstream last year thanks to the viral popularity of ChatGPT, introduced Sora in February.

According to OpenAI’s YouTube livestream, it will be rolling out to both US users and “most international countries” later today, and the company does not yet have “a timeline” for launching the tool in Europe and the UK, as well as a few others countries.

According to OpenAI, users will not need to pay extra for the tool as it will be included with existing ChatGPT accounts such as Plus and Pro. Livestream staff and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated features such as “blend” (that is, merging two scenes at the user’s command) and the option to loop an AI-generated video endlessly.

So far, Sora has been available primarily to a small group of security testers, called “red teamers,” who test the model for vulnerabilities in areas such as misinformation and bias.

Reddit users asked OpenAI executives in October about Sora’s release date, questioning whether it was delayed “due to the computational/time required to draw the conclusion or for security reasons.” In response, Kevin Weil, head of product at OpenAI, wrote: “The model needs to be perfected, security/impersonation/other things need to be right, and computing power needs to be scaled!”

“As OpenAI, we obviously have a big target in our sights, so we want to prevent Sora’s legal activities, but we also want to balance that with creative expression,” Rohan Sahai, OpenAI’s Sora product lead, said in the livestream.

OpenAI closed its latest funding round in October at a valuation of $157 billion, including the $6.6 billion the company raised from an extensive list of investment firms and Big Tech companies. The company also received a $4 billion revolving credit facility, increasing its total liquidity to over $10 billion.

This is all part of a serious growth plan for OpenAI Microsoft-supported startup struggles in the field of artificial intelligence Amazon-supported Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google, MetaMicrosoft and Amazon account for most of the generative AI market, which is expected to reach over $1 trillion in sales within a decade.

Earlier this month, OpenAI hired its first chief marketing officer and announced it would invest more in marketing to grow its user base. And in October, OpenAI unveiled a search feature within ChatGPT that better positions it to compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity, potentially attracting more users who otherwise would have visited those sites to search the web.

With Sora, the ChatGPT maker aims to compete with AI video generation tools from companies like Meta and Google, which announced Lumiere in January. Similar AI tools are available from other startups, such as Stability AI’s Stable Video Diffusion. Amazon has also released Create with Alexa, a model that specializes in creating prompt-based short-form animated content for children.

Video could be the next frontier for generative AI after chatbots and image generators make their way into the consumer and business worlds. While the creative possibilities will excite some AI enthusiasts, the new technologies raise serious misinformation problems amid important political elections around the world. According to data from Clarity, a machine learning company, the number of AI-generated deepfakes created has increased by 900% year over year.

OpenAI has made multimodality – the combination of text, image and video generation – a key goal in its push to offer a broader range of AI models.

News of Sora’s release follows protesters’ decision to leak an apparent copy of Sora over concerns about the ChatGPT maker’s treatment of artists.

Some members of OpenAI’s early access program for Sora, which reportedly included about 300 artists, published an open letter in late November criticizing OpenAI for not being sufficiently open or supporting the arts beyond marketing.

“Dear corporate AI overlords,” the protesters’ open letter reads, “we were given access to Sora with the promise of being early testers, red teamers, and creative partners. However, we believe we are being tricked into ‘artwashing’ to tell the story instead.” The world knows that Sora is a useful tool for artists.

The letter goes on to say that hundreds of artists provided unpaid work for OpenAI through bug testing and feedback on Sora, and that “while hundreds contribute for free, a few are selected through a competition to have their Sora-created films shown – and that.” with minimal compensation,” which pales in comparison to the significant PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.”

“We are not against the use of AI technology as a tool for the arts (if we were, we probably would not have been invited to this program),” the open letter says. “What we disagree with is the way this artist program was introduced and the way the tool is evolving ahead of a possible public release. We share this with the world in the hope that OpenAI will become more open, artist-friendly and support the arts beyond PR stunts.”

In late November, an OpenAI spokesperson responded to the protesters’ actions in a statement to CNBC.

“Hundreds of artists in our alpha have shaped the development of Sora and helped prioritize new features and security measures,” the OpenAI spokesperson said at the time. “Participation is voluntary and there is no obligation to provide feedback or use the tool. We are pleased to provide free access to these artists and will continue to support them through grants, events and other programs.”