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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I got lucky and got in moments after it launched, managed to get a video of "A pelican riding a bicycle along a coastal path overlooking a harbor" and then the queue times jumped up (my second video has been in the queue for 20+ minutes already) and the https://sora.com site now says "account creation currently unavailable"

Here's my pelican video: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/sora/

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For those who can't try Sora out, Tencent's super recent HunYuan is 100% open source and outperforms Sora. It's compatible with fine tuning, ComfyUI development, and is getting all manner of ControlNets and plugins.

I don't see how Sora can stay in this race. The open source commoditization is going to hit hard, and OpenAI probably doesn't have the product DNA or focus to bark up this tree too.

Tencent isn't the only company releasing open weights. Genmo, Black Forest Labs, and Lightricks are developing completely open source video models, and that's .

Even if there weren't open source competitors, there are a dozen closed source foundation video companies: Runway, Pika, Kling, Hailuo, etc.

I don't think OpenAI can afford to divert attention and win in this space. It'll be another Dall-E vs. Midjourney, Flux, Stable Diffusion.

https://github.com/Tencent/HunyuanVideo

https://x.com/kennethlynne/status/1865528133807386666

https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/hunyuan-video

> The Pelican inexplicably morphs to cycle in the opposite direction half way through

It's pretty cool though, the kind of thing that'd be hard if it was what you actually wanted!

"The Pelican inexplicably morphs to cycle in the opposite direction half way through"

Oof, if sora can't even manage to maintain an internal consistency of the world for a 5 second short, I can't imagine how exacerbated it'll be at longer video generation times.

That's an awful result. It turning around has absolutely nothing to do with what you asked for. It's similar in nature to what the chatbot in the recent and ongoing scandal said, saying to come home to her, when it should have known that the idea would be nonsensical or could be taken to mean something horrendous. https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

So you were lucky indeed to be able to run your prompt and share it, because the result was quite illuminating, but not in a way that looks good for Sora and OpenAI as a whole.

Image details 9/10 Animation 3/10 Temporal consistency 2/10

Verdict 4/10

Did you notice the frame rate (so to speak) of what's happening down the lake is much lower than the pelican's bicycle animation?

I don't have a lot of mental model for how this works, but I was surprised to note that it seems to maintain continuity on the shapes of the bushes and brown spots on the grass that track out of frame on the left and then reappear as it pans back into frame.

That must be exactly it. The simulated scene extends beyond what the camera is currently capturing.

Thanks, would you mind elaborate more on what you wrote below:

  Sora is built entirely around the idea of directly manipulating and editing and remixing the clips it generates, so the goal isn't to have it produce usable videos from a single prompt.

If you watch the OpenAI announcement they spend most of their time talking about the editing controls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jKVx2vyZOY

One of the highlights of any model release for me is checking your "pelican riding a bicycle" test.

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