Week in tech: What is the OpenAI Sora text-to-video model?

Here’s a look at what made news in the world of science and technology this week.

OpenAI's latest tool can convert your text prompts to videos

Earlier this week, ChatGPT maker OpenAI unveiled its next AI tool, which will let users create videos from text. SORA is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. According to ChatGPT, the text-to-video model can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt. It can also generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background, the company said. ChatGPT says the current model also has certain 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," OpenAI explains, adding that 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." Earlier this week, OpenAI also announced that it is testing an option for users to ask the ChatGPT chatbot to retain specific information from one exchange to the next.

‘Nearly half of the world's migratory species in decline’

An alarming report from the United Nations on 12 February said that the world's migratory species were under threat across the planet. The first-ever State of the World's Migratory Species assessment, which focusses on the 1,189 species covered by the UN Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), found that one in five is threatened with extinction and 44 percent are seeing their populations decline. Read more here.

A private spaceship heads for the Moon

On 15 February, a private US space lander took off from Florida and will now attempt to land near the south pole and carry out experiments on the lunar surface. Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company leading mission "IM-1," hopes to become the first non-government entity to achieve a soft touchdown on our celestial companion, and to land the first US robot on the surface since the Apollo missions more than five decades ago, an AFP report said. Its hexagonal-shaped Nova-C lander named "Odysseus" is carrying many science instruments and hardware that will help US space agency Nasa better understand and mitigate environmental risks for astronauts on the Moon. IM-1 is the second mission under a NASA initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which the space agency created to delegate cargo services to the private sector to achieve savings and to stimulate a wider lunar economy. Four more CLPS launches are expected this year, the AFP report said. Adding: “The first, by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, launched in January, but its Peregrine spacecraft experienced an engine anomaly that caused a fuel leak and it was eventually brought back to burn up in Earth's atmosphere."

(Compiled by Nitin Sreedhar, with inputs from agencies)

Also read: No evidence that AI can be controlled, says new research