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Sora

Creating video from text

Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.

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All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora without modification.

We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.

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Prompt: A stylish woman walks down a Tokyo street filled with warm glowing neon and animated city signage. She wears a black leather jacket, a long red dress, and black boots, and carries a black purse. She wears sunglasses and red lipstick. She walks confidently and casually. The street is damp and reflective, creating a mirror effect of the colorful lights. Many pedestrians walk about.
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Prompt: Several giant wooly mammoths approach treading through a snowy meadow, their long wooly fur lightly blows in the wind as they walk, snow covered trees and dramatic snow capped mountains in the distance, mid afternoon light with wispy clouds and a sun high in the distance creates a warm glow, the low camera view is stunning capturing the large furry mammal with beautiful photography, depth of field.
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Prompt: A movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30 year old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet, blue sky, salt desert, cinematic style, shot on 35mm film, vivid colors.
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Prompt: Drone view of waves crashing against the rugged cliffs along Big Sur’s garay point beach. The crashing blue waters create white-tipped waves, while the golden light of the setting sun illuminates the rocky shore. A small island with a lighthouse sits in the distance, and green shrubbery covers the cliff’s edge. The steep drop from the road down to the beach is a dramatic feat, with the cliff’s edges jutting out over the sea. This is a view that captures the raw beauty of the coast and the rugged landscape of the Pacific Coast Highway.
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Prompt: Animated scene features a close-up of a short fluffy monster kneeling beside a melting red candle. The art style is 3D and realistic, with a focus on lighting and texture. The mood of the painting is one of wonder and curiosity, as the monster gazes at the flame with wide eyes and open mouth. Its pose and expression convey a sense of innocence and playfulness, as if it is exploring the world around it for the first time. The use of warm colors and dramatic lighting further enhances the cozy atmosphere of the image.
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Prompt: A gorgeously rendered papercraft world of a coral reef, rife with colorful fish and sea creatures.
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Prompt: This close-up shot of a Victoria crowned pigeon showcases its striking blue plumage and red chest. Its crest is made of delicate, lacy feathers, while its eye is a striking red color. The bird’s head is tilted slightly to the side, giving the impression of it looking regal and majestic. The background is blurred, drawing attention to the bird’s striking appearance.
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Prompt: Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee.
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Prompt: A young man at his 20s is sitting on a piece of cloud in the sky, reading a book.
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Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals.

We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon.

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Prompt: Historical footage of California during the gold rush.
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Prompt: A close up view of a glass sphere that has a zen garden within it. There is a small dwarf in the sphere who is raking the zen garden and creating patterns in the sand.
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Prompt: Extreme close up of a 24 year old woman’s eye blinking, standing in Marrakech during magic hour, cinematic film shot in 70mm, depth of field, vivid colors, cinematic
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Prompt: A cartoon kangaroo disco dances.
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Prompt: A beautiful homemade video showing the people of Lagos, Nigeria in the year 2056. Shot with a mobile phone camera.
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Prompt: A petri dish with a bamboo forest growing within it that has tiny red pandas running around.
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Prompt: The camera rotates around a large stack of vintage televisions all showing different programs — 1950s sci-fi movies, horror movies, news, static, a 1970s sitcom, etc, set inside a large New York museum gallery.
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Prompt: 3D animation of a small, round, fluffy creature with big, expressive eyes explores a vibrant, enchanted forest. The creature, a whimsical blend of a rabbit and a squirrel, has soft blue fur and a bushy, striped tail. It hops along a sparkling stream, its eyes wide with wonder. The forest is alive with magical elements: flowers that glow and change colors, trees with leaves in shades of purple and silver, and small floating lights that resemble fireflies. The creature stops to interact playfully with a group of tiny, fairy-like beings dancing around a mushroom ring. The creature looks up in awe at a large, glowing tree that seems to be the heart of the forest.
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Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.

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Prompt: The camera follows behind a white vintage SUV with a black roof rack as it speeds up a steep dirt road surrounded by pine trees on a steep mountain slope, dust kicks up from it’s tires, the sunlight shines on the SUV as it speeds along the dirt road, casting a warm glow over the scene. The dirt road curves gently into the distance, with no other cars or vehicles in sight. The trees on either side of the road are redwoods, with patches of greenery scattered throughout. The car is seen from the rear following the curve with ease, making it seem as if it is on a rugged drive through the rugged terrain. The dirt road itself is surrounded by steep hills and mountains, with a clear blue sky above with wispy clouds.
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Prompt: Reflections in the window of a train traveling through the Tokyo suburbs.
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Prompt: A drone camera circles around a beautiful historic church built on a rocky outcropping along the Amalfi Coast, the view showcases historic and magnificent architectural details and tiered pathways and patios, waves are seen crashing against the rocks below as the view overlooks the horizon of the coastal waters and hilly landscapes of the Amalfi Coast Italy, several distant people are seen walking and enjoying vistas on patios of the dramatic ocean views, the warm glow of the afternoon sun creates a magical and romantic feeling to the scene, the view is stunning captured with beautiful photography.
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Prompt: A large orange octopus is seen resting on the bottom of the ocean floor, blending in with the sandy and rocky terrain. Its tentacles are spread out around its body, and its eyes are closed. The octopus is unaware of a king crab that is crawling towards it from behind a rock, its claws raised and ready to attack. The crab is brown and spiny, with long legs and antennae. The scene is captured from a wide angle, showing the vastness and depth of the ocean. The water is clear and blue, with rays of sunlight filtering through. The shot is sharp and crisp, with a high dynamic range. The octopus and the crab are in focus, while the background is slightly blurred, creating a depth of field effect.
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Prompt: A flock of paper airplanes flutters through a dense jungle, weaving around trees as if they were migrating birds.
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Prompt: A cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast. The owner tries to ignore the cat, but the cat tries new tactics and finally the owner pulls out a secret stash of treats from under the pillow to hold the cat off a little longer.
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Prompt: Borneo wildlife on the Kinabatangan River
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Prompt: A Chinese Lunar New Year celebration video with Chinese Dragon.
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The model has a deep understanding of language, enabling it to accurately interpret prompts and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions. Sora can also create multiple shots within a single generated video that accurately persist characters and visual style.

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Prompt: Tour of an art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles.
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Prompt: Beautiful, snowy Tokyo city is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street, following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes.
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Prompt: A stop motion animation of a flower growing out of the windowsill of a suburban house.
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Prompt: The story of a robot’s life in a cyberpunk setting.
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Prompt: An extreme close-up of an gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s, he is deep in thought pondering the history of the universe as he sits at a cafe in Paris, his eyes focus on people offscreen as they walk as he sits mostly motionless, he is dressed in a wool coat suit coat with a button-down shirt , he wears a brown beret and glasses and has a very professorial appearance, and the end he offers a subtle closed-mouth smile as if he found the answer to the mystery of life, the lighting is very cinematic with the golden light and the Parisian streets and city in the background, depth of field, cinematic 35mm film.
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Prompt: A beautiful silhouette animation shows a wolf howling at the moon, feeling lonely, until it finds its pack.
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Prompt: New York City submerged like Atlantis. Fish, whales, sea turtles and sharks swim through the streets of New York.
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Prompt: A litter of golden retriever puppies playing in the snow. Their heads pop out of the snow, covered in.
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The current model has weaknesses. It may struggle with accurately simulating the physics of a complex scene, and may not understand specific instances of cause and effect. For example, a person might take a bite out of a cookie, but afterward, the cookie may not have a bite mark.

The model may also confuse spatial details of a prompt, for example, mixing up left and right, and may struggle with precise descriptions of events that take place over time, like following a specific camera trajectory.

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Prompt: Step-printing scene of a person running, cinematic film shot in 35mm.
Weakness: Sora sometimes creates physically implausible motion.
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Prompt: Five gray wolf pups frolicking and chasing each other around a remote gravel road, surrounded by grass. The pups run and leap, chasing each other, and nipping at each other, playing.
Weakness: Animals or people can spontaneously appear, especially in scenes containing many entities.
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Prompt: Basketball through hoop then explodes.
Weakness: An example of inaccurate physical modeling and unnatural object “morphing.”
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Prompt: Archeologists discover a generic plastic chair in the desert, excavating and dusting it with great care.
Weakness: In this example, Sora fails to model the chair as a rigid object, leading to inaccurate physical interactions.
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Prompt: A grandmother with neatly combed grey hair stands behind a colorful birthday cake with numerous candles at a wood dining room table, expression is one of pure joy and happiness, with a happy glow in her eye. She leans forward and blows out the candles with a gentle puff, the cake has pink frosting and sprinkles and the candles cease to flicker, the grandmother wears a light blue blouse adorned with floral patterns, several happy friends and family sitting at the table can be seen celebrating, out of focus. The scene is beautifully captured, cinematic, showing a 3/4 view of the grandmother and the dining room. Warm color tones and soft lighting enhance the mood..
Weakness: Simulating complex interactions between objects and multiple characters is often challenging for the model, sometimes resulting in humorous generations.
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Safety

We’ll be taking several important safety steps ahead of making Sora available in OpenAI’s products. We are working with red teamers — domain experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content, and bias — who will be adversarially testing the model.

We’re also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora. We plan to include C2PA metadata in the future if we deploy the model in an OpenAI product.

In addition to us developing new techniques to prepare for deployment, we’re leveraging the existing safety methods that we built for our products that use DALL·E 3, which are applicable to Sora as well.

For example, once in an OpenAI product, our text classifier will check and reject text input prompts that are in violation of our usage policies, like those that request extreme violence, sexual content, hateful imagery, celebrity likeness, or the IP of others. We’ve also developed robust image classifiers that are used to review the frames of every video generated to help ensure that it adheres to our usage policies, before it’s shown to the user.

We’ll be engaging policymakers, educators and artists around the world to understand their concerns and to identify positive use cases for this new technology. Despite extensive research and testing, we cannot predict all of the beneficial ways people will use our technology, nor all the ways people will abuse it. That’s why we believe that learning from real-world use is a critical component of creating and releasing increasingly safe AI systems over time.

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Prompt: The camera directly faces colorful buildings in burano italy. An adorable dalmation looks through a window on a building on the ground floor. Many people are walking and cycling along the canal streets in front of the buildings.
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Prompt: An adorable happy otter confidently stands on a surfboard wearing a yellow lifejacket, riding along turquoise tropical waters near lush tropical islands, 3D digital render art style.
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Prompt: This close-up shot of a chameleon showcases its striking color changing capabilities. The background is blurred, drawing attention to the animal’s striking appearance.
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Prompt: A corgi vlogging itself in tropical Maui.
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Prompt: A white and orange tabby cat is seen happily darting through a dense garden, as if chasing something. Its eyes are wide and happy as it jogs forward, scanning the branches, flowers, and leaves as it walks. The path is narrow as it makes its way between all the plants. the scene is captured from a ground-level angle, following the cat closely, giving a low and intimate perspective. The image is cinematic with warm tones and a grainy texture. The scattered daylight between the leaves and plants above creates a warm contrast, accentuating the cat’s orange fur. The shot is clear and sharp, with a shallow depth of field.
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Prompt: Aerial view of Santorini during the blue hour, showcasing the stunning architecture of white Cycladic buildings with blue domes. The caldera views are breathtaking, and the lighting creates a beautiful, serene atmosphere.
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Prompt: Tiltshift of a construction site filled with workers, equipment, and heavy machinery.
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Prompt: A giant, towering cloud in the shape of a man looms over the earth. The cloud man shoots lighting bolts down to the earth.
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Prompt: A Samoyed and a Golden Retriever dog are playfully romping through a futuristic neon city at night. The neon lights emitted from the nearby buildings glistens off of their fur.
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Prompt: The Glenfinnan Viaduct is a historic railway bridge in Scotland, UK, that crosses over the west highland line between the towns of Mallaig and Fort William. It is a stunning sight as a steam train leaves the bridge, traveling over the arch-covered viaduct. The landscape is dotted with lush greenery and rocky mountains, creating a picturesque backdrop for the train journey. The sky is blue and the sun is shining, making for a beautiful day to explore this majestic spot.
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Research techniques

Sora is a diffusion model, which generates a video by starting off with one that looks like static noise and gradually transforms it by removing the noise over many steps.

Sora is capable of generating entire videos all at once or extending generated videos to make them longer. By giving the model foresight of many frames at a time, we’ve solved a challenging problem of making sure a subject stays the same even when it goes out of view temporarily.

Similar to GPT models, Sora uses a transformer architecture, unlocking superior scaling performance.

We represent videos and images as collections of smaller units of data called patches, each of which is akin to a token in GPT. By unifying how we represent data, we can train diffusion transformers on a wider range of visual data than was possible before, spanning different durations, resolutions and aspect ratios.

Sora builds on past research in DALL·E and GPT models. It uses the recaptioning technique from DALL·E 3, which involves generating highly descriptive captions for the visual training data. As a result, the model is able to follow the user’s text instructions in the generated video more faithfully.

In addition to being able to generate a video solely from text instructions, the model is able to take an existing still image and generate a video from it, animating the image’s contents with accuracy and attention to small detail. The model can also take an existing video and extend it or fill in missing frames. Learn more in our technical report.

Sora serves as a foundation for models that can understand and simulate the real world, a capability we believe will be an important milestone for achieving AGI.

Sora

All videos on this page were generated directly by Sora without modification.

Research LeadsBill Peebles & Tim Brooks
Systems LeadConnor Holmes
Contributors
Clarence Wing Yin Ng
David Schnurr
Eric Luhman
Joe Taylor
Li Jing
Natalie Summers
Ricky Wang
Rohan Sahai
Ryan O’Rourke
Troy Luhman
Will DePue
Yufei Guo
Special ThanksBob McGrew, Brad Lightcap, Chad Nelson, David Medina, Gabriel Goh, Greg Brockman, Ian Sohl, Jamie Kiros, James Betker, Jason Kwon, Hannah Wong, Mark Chen, Michelle Fradin, Mira Murati, Nick Turley, Prafulla Dhariwal, Rowan Zellers, Sarah Yoo, Sandhini Agarwal, Sam Altman, Srinivas Narayanan & Wesam Manassra
Communications
Elie Georges
Justin Wang
Kendra Rimbach
Niko Felix
Thomas Degry
Veit Moeller
Legal
Che Chang
Fred von Lohmann
Gideon Myles
Tom Stasi
External EngagementAlex Baker-Whitcomb, Allie Teague, Anna Makanju, Anna McKean, Becky Waite, Brittany Smith, Chan Park, Chris Lehane, David Duxin, David Robinson, James Hairston, Jonathan Lachman, Justin Oswald, Krithika Muthukumar, Lane Dilg, Leher Pathak, Ola Nowicka, Ryan Biddy, Sandro Gianella, Stephen Petersilge, Tom Rubin & Varun Shetty
Executive ProducerAditya Ramesh
Built by OpenAI in San Francisco, California
Published February 15, MMXXIV