Sora

Nah, that's not the "proper" way to think about it, that's just your opinion. As it stands today, AI video generation tools like Sora suck up useful energy and produce things that are useless at best (throwaway short form videos), and harmful at worst (propaganda, deepfakes). Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.

The Sora app squaring off against Meta's social video app is the real story here. Sora 2 itself looks and sounds a little poorer than Google Veo 3. (Which is itself not currently ranked as the top video model. The Chinese models are dominating.) I think Google, with their massive YouTube data set, is ultimately going to win this game. They have all the data and infrastructure in the world to build best-in-class video models, and they're just getting started. The social battle will be something completely different, though. And that's something that I think OpenAI stands a good chance at winning. Edit: Most companies that are confident of their image or video models stealthily launch it on the Model Arena a week ahead of the public model release. OpenAI did not arrange to do that for Sora 2. Nano Banana, Seedream/Seedance, Kling, and several other models have followed this pattern of "stealth ELO ranking, then reveal pole position". https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader... The fact that this model is about "friends" and "social" implies that this is an underpowered model. You probably saw a cherry picked highlight reel with a large VRAM context, but the actual consumer product will be engineered for efficiency. Built to sustain a high volume of cheap generations, not expensive high quality ones. A product built to face off against Meta. That model compete on the basis of putting you into videos with Pikachu, Mario, and Goku.

As a movie consumer I am not interested in AI movies. You don't get to just keep the existing market and switch to AI. You are creating a new market of AI video consumers and hoping it's big enough.

Most of the papers in machine learning are coming from China. The vast majority. Most of the open source models on GitHub, too. Hailuo, Kling, Vidu, and Hunyuan (posted on Banodoko) blow Sora and Runway out of the water. China is dominating at this field. And if they begin releasing weights as open source, that'll mean foundation model companies can only bank on the thin facade of product. That's a really good strategy to make sure American AI startups don't achieve escape velocity if they have to fend of dozens of fungible clones.