Sora 2 - It will only get more realistic from here

Sora 2 is out and for some it will seem like a slop feed shoggoth. For others a glimpse at a genuinely generalist AI. Visually it could be seen as the best that has ever come out of text video but for others barely an improvement on VO3 from Google. It's up to you of course but I will try to focus on six elements you might not have caught from the viral release video and announcement.

So, is it all a distraction though from physical science breakthroughs like those promised by periodic labs or the coding supremacy of Claude 4.5 Sonnet? Depends who you ask. But let's get started. First, a quick one.

One detail that many may have missed. There are actually two Sora 2os. OpenAI said Pro users will be able to use our experimental higher quality Sora 2 Pro initially on sora.com and then in the app as well. But my question is where did all the best demos come which you're going to see in this video and which went viral?

Could it be that most of those were Sora 2 Pro and therefore what most people will access is just the normal Sora 2. These things are incredibly expensive to run, don't forget. And OpenAI do eventually have to make a profit. And then there's the rollout.

According to the Sora 2 system card, that invitation system that which is a bit jank is actually deliberate to slow things down. That's maybe also why it's only for the US and Canada initially. iOS only premium but with limits that will actually decrease as new users join with no API though apparently that's promised in the coming weeks. All of that is deliberate and part of the safety focused iterative rollout strategy.

Then there's the inevitable comparisons initially between Sora 1 and Sora 2, but I'm going to throw in V3 demos too for reference made via V3 preview on Gemini online and V3 quality with Google Flow. Now, note that one of the leads for Sora 2 said that that model is intelligent in a way that we haven't seen with a video model before. So, they're claiming it has the best world model. You could say image to video or video to video is not yet allowed, although we'll get to cameos later.

All of this begs the inevitable question as to which ...