Sora memorial video marks 15 months without public release as open-weight rivals ship
A user-created tribute video for OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model is as the service remains locked behind a waitlist with no public timeline, while open-weight competitors like LTX Video and Kling have already shipped.
A memorial-style video for OpenAI's Sora text-to-video model surfaced this week, reflecting growing frustration over the platform's prolonged restricted access. The clip, which plays like a eulogy for the unreleased service, has drawn hundreds of upvotes from users who signed up for early access but never received invitations. Sora was announced in February 2024 with sample outputs showcasing 60-second clips with temporal consistency and physics simulation, but OpenAI has kept the model behind a waitlist with no public timeline for general availability. The company's last update came in December 2024, citing "capacity constraints" and promising news in early 2025—a window that closed without announcement.