I wanted to note some initial thoughts down on two new products that have just hit my inbox today. The first is Sora (the app) running Sora 2 (the model), used for video generation, and the second is the Droid CLI by Factory. This will be the review for Sora and Sora 2 respectively.
Sora is pretty fun! I’m seeing a ton of historical figure selfie videos (i.e. Jesus at the last supper), style transfers (what if Spongebob is in the Oppenheimer film universe), and other Ridiculous videos that are impossible, i.e. a cop arresting a dog for stealing beef at Costco. Overall the videos are pretty good. Text is still troublesome, but it’s wild at how good it gets. For example, I had a UGC tiktok style video with generated subtitles and it only missed one word out of the bunch.
As far as the app itself, it’s really fun to watch a bunch of wild videos, more than I had thought.
Video generation is really easy. You basically just click a big plus, write your description of the video, and then it will generate in about five minutes, give or take. It’s easy enough to fire off a bunch of videos and I found the limits contrary to the internet’s expectations to be fairly reasonable.
One thing I’m always wanting with this is a new way to think of content. Some sort of flagging or categorizing could be very helpful. For instance, a video appears in Drafts, but a video may have a really bad visual error. I could delete it immediately, but maybe would want to show someone how funny it is. If I had like a 1-5 ranking or something, It would be super easy to filter to say what is my best video what is my middle video what is my worst video.
Overall it’s wild - this is just such a crazy time. I’m not sure where it’s all going, but it’s awesome to be able to watch it unfold.