Woke up around 7:30, made coffee, opened Twitter (still calling it that, sue me) like every other morning, and by 8am my whole feed had turned into a film festival. OpenAI put out Sora today, this text-to-video model that spits out up to a minute of video from a sentence or two of prompt, and for about six hours straight that was the only thing anyone in my corner of tech Twitter wanted to talk about.
I'm not going to walk you through every sample clip because if you're reading a tech blog today you've already seen them three times over: the woman walking through a rain-slicked Tokyo street with neon signs reflecting everywhere, the woolly mammoths trudging through snow, a couple of dogs doing something ridiculous on a mountain. Sam Altman spent a chunk of his morning replying to random prompts people threw at him on Twitter and posting back generated clips within minutes, which honestly was the more interesting part to me than the official demo reel. Watching a company founder personally play prompt-jockey in real time says something about how confident they are in the thing, or maybe just how much they wanted the news cycle today.
Here's my actual reaction though, and it's not the one I expected to have. The videos are impressive, genuinely, the lighting and camera movement especially. But watching six or seven of them back to back this morning left me a little cold rather than amazed. Everything has this same dreamy, slightly-too-smooth quality, like a really good screensaver that's forgotten what gravity is supposed to do to a shoelace. A friend of mine does freelance stock footage work, actually does it for a living, shoots B-roll for corporate explainer videos, and I thought about texting him a link and then didn't, because what's there to say. "Hey, look at this thing that might make your invoices smaller" isn't exactly a fun text to send someone at 8am on a Thursday.
I keep seeing people compare this to when DALL-E 2 came out, or when Midjourney got good, and sure, the shape of the hype is the same. But video is a different kind of unsettling than a still image. A weird hand in a still picture is a curiosity you scroll past. A weird hand moving through thirty frames a second, doing something almost-but-not-quite like a real hand would do, sits in your stomach a little differently. None of the clips I saw today had an obviously broken hand, to be clear (I'm talking about the overall texture of the thing, not a specific glitch). It's the uncanny valley but stretched out over sixty seconds instead of one frame.
Not available to the public yet either. They're doing the whole red-team-it-first thing before anyone outside a small group gets to actually type a prompt in, which is the responsible move and also, cynically, a pretty good way to keep the hype simmering for a few more weeks while they figure out what a version of this regular people can use is even supposed to look like. I don't blame them. I'd probably do the same thing if I'd just built something that good and that easy to misuse.
In completely unrelated news, my downstairs neighbor's WiFi router died sometime overnight, and instead of asking me for my login like a normal person, he started leeching off the coffee shop's guest network from his window with what I'm pretty sure was a USB antenna taped to a broom handle. I only know this because I saw him doing it around 9am while I was still doomscrolling AI horse videos, and it was, not gonna lie, a nice reminder that most of the internet is still just people improvising with duct tape and whatever's within reach. Somewhere between the mammoth video and the broom-handle antenna felt like an honest snapshot of where tech actually is right now, the shiny future stuff and the very analog reality of somebody just trying to get their laptop online, happening on the same block, on the same Thursday morning.
I'll probably have more to say about Sora once actual people who aren't OpenAI employees get their hands on it. For now I've got eleven tabs open, half of them AI video clips and half of them router troubleshooting guides I don't even need, and a coffee that's gone cold sitting next to my keyboard.