Sora is OpenAI’s family of text-to-video models, which generate video clips directly from natural-language prompts. Video is far harder to generate than still images because the system must keep objects, characters, and scenes consistent across many frames and render plausible motion over time, so Sora extended generative AI into a substantially more demanding modality.
The line has moved through clear stages. In February 2024 OpenAI introduced Sora on a page titled “Sora: Creating video from text,” but this was a research preview, not a product. On December 9, 2024, OpenAI moved Sora out of research preview and made it generally available, releasing a faster version called Sora Turbo as a standalone product at sora.com for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers, with the tiers differing in resolution, clip length, and number of generations. The roughly ten-month gap between the first demonstration clips and a usable product underscored how much harder it is to ship reliable generative video than to demonstrate it.
OpenAI subsequently announced Sora 2, released to select users beginning September 30, 2025 under the banner “Sora 2 is here,” alongside a dedicated Sora app that added social features around video creation and sharing. Because OpenAI’s product lineup advances and the exact current Sora offering changes over time, the live openai.com/sora pages are the reference for what is currently available; this entry fixes the announced milestones rather than a frozen feature list.
Distribution is through OpenAI’s apps and subscription tiers rather than open weights.
Note on sourcing: OpenAI’s pages return an HTTP 403 error to automated fetchers, so the general-availability and Sora 2 details were corroborated through search against the canonical openai.com Sora posts cited above, the same sourcing path used by the 2024 Sora milestone entry.
Why business readers should care: Sora signaled that video, one of the most expensive and labor-intensive forms of media to produce, was entering the generative-AI era, with direct implications for marketing, entertainment, and communication as the technology matures toward production use.