Surprised by Video Generation 'AI Sora' in China... "Newton Moment"

China, which has been competing with the United States in artificial intelligence (AI) development, appears shocked by the emergence of the AI system 'Sora.' Local media have been flooding reports daily, discussing the impact Sora will have on various markets and its future development. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, announced that it will unveil a test site for a similar video technology model within 2 to 3 months.

According to local media such as China Finance Online on the 21st, Zhou Hongyi, founder of Chinese internet security company Qihoo 360, wrote on his social networking service (SNS) Weibo immediately after Sora's announcement, "Sora will completely shake up the advertising and movie trailer industries." However, he added that Sora would not displace TikTok (Douyin) that quickly and is expected to remain a production tool for TikTok for the time being.

[Image source=AFP Yonhap News]

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The emergence of Sora has also led to forecasts that the time required to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) close to human intelligence could be drastically shortened from 10 years to 1 to 2 years. At the same time, he evaluated that the development level of China's large language models (LLM) lags about a year and a half behind OpenAI's GPT-4.0, which was released in March last year.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that an official praised Sora as a 'Newton moment,' meaning this emergence is a discovery comparable to Newton's laws of motion.

Another source suggested that OpenAI, supported by Microsoft (MS), might be developing another 'secret weapon' that could widen the AI gap between the U.S. and China. Following Sora's appearance, some within China pointed out that Chinese companies, which had fallen behind in LLMs, are once again being chased in the video field.

A blogger attracted attention by releasing a short animation titled 'Journey to the West,' reportedly created using Sora. The blogger 'AI Mental Hospital' from Sichuan Province, who has 15 years of experience in art work, said, "It usually takes at least half a year to complete manually, but with Sora's help, it was finished in just a week," adding, "The speed is literally faster than Sun Wukong, the protagonist of Journey to the West."

Some express anticipation for the emergence of a 'Chinese version of Sora.' Rumors circulated in the market the day before that ByteDance is developing a Chinese version of Sora's video technology model called Boximator. A ByteDance representative explained this as "a research project on technology controlling object movements in the video generation field," but also stated, "It is at a stage where it cannot be implemented as a complete product." They added, "Currently, there is a significant gap compared to foreign models in terms of image quality, fidelity, and video duration," and mentioned, "A test site will be launched within 2 to 3 months."

Earlier, OpenAI announced on the morning of the 16th that Sora incorporates technology that produces videos up to 1 minute long from text.

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