OpenAI logo, creators of Sora

Sora: AI Video Generation

What Happened

OpenAI previewed Sora, a model that could generate photorealistic videos up to a minute long from text descriptions. The quality stunned the world — realistic physics, complex camera movements, and coherent scenes that looked like professional cinematography.

Why It Mattered

Shocked the film, advertising, and creative industries. For the first time, AI could generate convincing video — a capability many thought was years away. Accelerated existential debates about AI's impact on creative professions.

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Related Milestones

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Research

GPT-4: Multimodal Intelligence

OpenAI released GPT-4, a multimodal model that could understand both text and images. It passed the bar exam (90th percentile), scored 1410 on the SAT, and demonstrated remarkably nuanced reasoning. It was a massive leap from GPT-3.5 in accuracy, safety, and capability.

OpenAI
OpenAI logo, creators of o1
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OpenAI o1: Reasoning Models

OpenAI released o1, a model trained to 'think before it speaks' using chain-of-thought reasoning at inference time. It could solve complex math, coding, and science problems by spending more compute thinking through multi-step solutions — trading speed for accuracy on hard problems.

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AI-generated image by DALL-E
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DALL-E: Text to Image Generation

OpenAI unveiled DALL-E, a model that could generate images from text descriptions — 'an armchair in the shape of an avocado' became iconic. Built on GPT-3's architecture adapted for images, it showed that language models could bridge the gap between text and visual creativity.

OpenAI
OpenAI logo
Product

GPT-4o: Omni Model

OpenAI released GPT-4o ('omni'), a unified model that natively processed text, audio, images, and video with near-instant response times. It could hold natural voice conversations with emotional expression, sing, laugh, and respond to visual input in real time.

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GPT-2 language model generating text about itself
Research

GPT-2: 'Too Dangerous to Release'

OpenAI announced GPT-2 (1.5 billion parameters) but initially refused to release the full model, calling it 'too dangerous' due to its ability to generate convincing fake text. The decision was controversial — some praised the caution, others called it a publicity stunt. The full model was eventually released in November 2019.

Alec RadfordOpenAI

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