OpenAI is putting its powerful video creation tool, Sora, in the hands of basically every one of the millions of people who pay for ChatGPT, the company said yesterday.

Why it matters: We're about to witness an at-scale experiment in what it means for people to create and consume large quantities of video content that is photorealistic but fake.

The big picture: OpenAI released Sora precisely because it wants the results of that experiment.

• "We're introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it's used responsibly as the field advances," the company wrote in a post introducing the new product.

Catch up quick: When OpenAI gave the public a sneak peek at Sora in February, the clips the company showed caused jaws to drop — but also triggered an allergic reaction in Hollywood.

• Many artists view the advent of AI-generated video as a fraud and an insult. Just as with text-based AI, many creators also believe OpenAI trained its tool using copyrighted works.

What they're saying: "We don't want the world to just be text," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a live-streamed announcement yesterday. Video is "important to our culture."

The company said in a statement that the latest Turbo version of Sora is "significantly faster" than the version the firm previewed. It lets users generate videos up to 20 seconds long.

An early review by Marques Brownlee, who got to play with Sora before the release, details some of what OpenAI admits are the "many limitations" of the tool.

• In particular, Sora's videos regularly seem to have problems handling basic physics. Objects appear and disappear, particularly when something else moves in front of them.

OpenAI isn't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. In yesterday's live-streamed launch, Sora team leaders said the tool was "not about generating feature-length movies" but instead provides a "co-creative dynamic" so users can explore new ideas.

• The new version of the tool lets you drop your own images in as prompts. There's also a timeline editor that lets you add new prompts at specific moments in a video.

The company said it understands that putting Sora into so many hands could cause problems.

• Altman said OpenAI wants to prevent illegal use of the tool, "but we also want to balance that with creative expression."
• Users' ability to upload images of people will be "limited at launch," OpenAI's blog post said.

OpenAI's competitors, including Google and Meta, are also moving fast with AI video-making offerings in the meantime.

Zoom out: Today's online world isn't exactly experiencing a shortage of brief videos.

• Logged-in Sora users can view a bottomless feed of "featured" Sora-made videos, alongside the prompts that created them.
• OpenAI suggests aspiring video producers will want to use this feed as a source of inspiration, and doubtless they will — but this viewing mode also feels a lot like TikTok or YouTube.

Some observers yesterday applauded Sora's capabilities, while others predicted it would deluge us with AI "slop."

What we're watching: OpenAI aims to prevent outright illegal uses of Sora to create child sexual abuse material, impersonation and other problematic material.

• But even if the company succeeds, internet users have a way of pushing the boundaries of new tools like this until every possible awful output has been demonstrated.

The bottom line: Sora's evolution will give us all an early glimpse of how our social and political systems handle broad exposure to AI-made video.

Go deeper: Video-making AI tools are moving into general use

The maker of Moxie, an AI-powered robot for kids, is shutting down.

Why it matters: The parents who bought the device are not only out several hundred dollars — now they also have to explain to their kids why a beloved companion is, essentially, dying.

The big picture: The move is a reminder that hardware remains a tough business — with the added difficulty that, when AI systems go bust, there can be emotional consequences, too.

Driving the news: Embodied, the company behind Moxie, notified customers and the public this week that the firm was shutting down, and expects all Moxie robots to stop functioning, likely within days.

• The company said its financial straits mean it can offer no refunds for the robots, which retailed for $799.

Embodied blamed the company's demise on its failure to close a vital funding round.

• "We had secured a lead investor who was prepared to close the round," the company said. "However, at the last minute, they withdrew leaving us with no viable options to continue operations."

Catch up quick: Moxie was designed for kids ages 5 to 10, and offered a range of games and activities as well as the ability to have open-ended conversations.

• After first taking kids through a series of "missions" designed for human and robot to get to know one another, Moxie offered a wide repertoire of skills, including the ability to tell jokes, serve up brain teasers and play games — as well as just chatting with kids about their interests and emotions.

Yes, but: All of those abilities required a constant connection to a cloud-based AI system, and Embodied's demise will sever that link.

• Some stories of parents breaking the news to their kids have gone viral on TikTok.

Google yesterday revealed a new quantum chip that it says solves one of quantum computing's thorniest problems: correcting the errors that plague efforts to make the new technology more useful.

Why it matters: Dealing with errors is a core challenge for quantum computers that many experts say stands in the way of building a practical quantum machine that can solve a range of problems beyond the reach of classical computers.

• Google, IBM, Microsoft and a slew of other companies are trying to build quantum computers, while China and other countries are pouring billions of dollars into the technology.

Where it stands: Today's quantum computers are largely used for research problems — modeling materials or chemical reactions — that could one day support business goals. But they can't break encryption or crack other problems researchers think (or debate) they might one day solve.

• That is generally expected to require millions of quantum bits, or qubits. The bits in a classical computer have only two states, but qubits can have many by harnessing the properties of subatomic particles.
• A quantum computer's power grows exponentially as the number of qubits increases and they become entangled.
• But many qubits are also needed to correct the errors that come from the noise of combining many qubits — a key hurdle for quantum computers.

How it works: Google researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature that they've found a way to reduce errors in their quantum system while increasing the number of qubits — a key milestone known as "below threshold."

• Their 105-qubit processor, Willow, performed in under five minutes a computation that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — about a quadrillion times longer than the universe has been around.

The bottom line: "This is a really big deal for quantum error correction, and it's somewhere that we've been wanting to be for 20 years or so," Michael Newman, a member of the Google Research team, told Axios.

• Microsoft consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman sat down with The Verge for a wide-ranging interview discussing OpenAI, joining Microsoft, his time at DeepMind and more. (The Verge)

Many of us use genAI as a brainstorming tool, a Google replacement, or a way to draft boilerplate messages.

• Others are using it for human companionship, parenting help, or creating podcasts about poop.

We want to hear the most unusual ways you're using ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Meta AI, xAI or any other generative AI tool in your daily lives.

• Reply to this newsletter or email [email protected] before Dec. 13. Please let us know your name and city, and thanks!