Is it me or does it seem like OpenAI revolutionized with both chatGPT and Sora, but they've completely hit the ceiling?
Honestly a bit surprised it happened so fast!
Each company would either rush to get a phone out with the new snapdragon chip, or take their time to polish a release and have a better phone late cycle. But the real improvements we're just the chip.
Nvidia chips/larger data centers are the chips. the models are the plethora of android phones each generation.
That kept going until progress stabilized. Then the best user experience & vertical integration won over chasing chip performance (apple).
Another example of this is stuff like Bluesky. There's a lot of reasons to hate Twitter/X, but people going "Wow, Bluesky is so amazing, there's no ads and it's so much less toxic!" aren't complimenting Bluesky, they're just noting that it's smaller, has less attention, and so they don't have ads or the toxic masses YET.
GenAI image generation is an obvious vector for all sorts of problems, from copyrighted material, to real life people, to porn, and so on. OpenAI and Google have to be extraordinarily strict about this due to all the attention on them, and so end up locking down artistic expression dramatically.
Midjourney and Stable Diffision may have equal stature amongst tech people, but in the public sphere they're unknowns. So they can get away with more risk.
Why? Did the inventors of VHS tapes "have to be extraordinarily strict" and bake in safeguards because people might violate copyright laws, make porn, or tape something illegal?
Enforcing laws is the responsibility of the legal system. It sets a concerning precedent when companies like OAI would rather lobotomize their flagship products than risk them generating any Wrongthink.
Besides just citing your sources, I'm genuinely curious what the best ones are for this so I can see the competition :)
That's not the only open video model, either. Lightricks' LTX, Genmo's Mochi, and Black Forest Labs' upcoming models will all be open source video foundation models.
Sora is commoditized like Dall-E at this point.
Video will be dominated by players like Flux and Stable Diffusion.
I think the important thing is task quality and I haven't seen any evaluations of that yet.
It took two weeks to go from Mochi running on 8xH100s to running on 3090s. I don't think you appreciate the rapidity at which open source moves in this space.
HunYuan landed less than one week ago with just one modality (text-to-video), and it's already got LoRA training and fine tuning code, Comfy nodes, and control nets. Their roadmap is technically impressive and has many more control levers in scope.
I don't think you realize how "commodity" these models are and how closed off "turn key solutions" quickly get out-innovated by the wider ecosystem: nobody talks about or uses Dall-E to any extent anymore. It's all about open models like Flux and Stable Diffusion.
{Text/Image/Video}-to-Video is an inadequate modality for creative work anyway, and OpenAI is already behind on pairing other types of input with their models. This is something that the open ecosystem is excelling at. We have perfect syncing to dance choreography, music reactive textures, and character consistency. Sora has none of that and will likely never have those things.
> something time-sharing like Sora where you pay a relatively small amount per video.
Creators would prefer to run all of this on their own machines rather than pay for hosted SaaS that costs them thousands of dollars.
And for those that do prefer SaaS, there are abundant solutions for running hosted Comfy and a constellation of other models as on-demand.
- uncensored output (SD + LoRa)
- Overall speed of generation (midjourney)
- Image quality (probably midjourney, or an SDXL checkpoint + upscaler)
- Prompt adherence (flux, DALL-E 3)
EDIT: This is strictly around image generation. The main video competitors are Kling, Hailuo, and Runway.
You can see more model samples heee https://youtu.be/bCAV_9O1ioc
you probably meant Stable Diffusion XL. (autocorrect victim)
In terms of image quality. Runway, Luma, and a few of the Chinese models all give "ok" results. I haven't seen anything from Sora to convince me they have done any kind of significant leap.
The issue there is alignment. It's cheap for Runway or Luma to continue in this path since it's their only path to profitability, they do nothing else.
But for OpenAI, I don't think this is near their top list of priorities. I doubt that they will be able to keep adding features like their competitors. Seems to me like this is the equivalent of a side project for them.
edit after watching direct comparison videos, I've changed my mind. Sora is ahead.
For anyone who is curious where to find tons of SORA videos, go to reddit r/aivideo
This is not a problem as long as they do the ChatGPT thing, and sell an API and let others figure out how to build an UX around it, but here they seem to be gunning for creating a boxed product.
It was fun for a few days but far more limited than I would have ever expected.
Maybe Sora 5.0 will be something special. Right now though all these video models are basically shit.