Text to video generation SOARS forward with OpenAI Sora 🕊️

Author

Weike Qu
February 20, 2024

Give it another five years and maybe half of all YouTube videos will contain AI generated videos… Scary times.

Text to video generation SOARS forward with OpenAI Sora 🕊️

Prompt: A movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30 year old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet, blue sky, salt desert, cinematic style, shot on 35mm film, vivid colors.

If you weren’t privy to the announcement last Thursday, drop whatever you’re doing and go check out the Sora AI model announcement from Open AI. This new announcement and accompanying videos (though probably cherry picked), represents a significant jump in a model’s ability to form realistic and temporally coherent scenes. That’s absolutely amazing. See the comparison generation below from less than a year ago. The immediate ramification of this, however, is its impact on stock videos. Anytime anyone needs a customized stock video for background footage, this would provide a fantastic amount of value.

Will Smith has never looked more excited

IStructE’s new President Tanya de Hoog’s vision for 2024

Technology hype aside and continuing on the theme of professional responsibility, we as engineers have a solemn duty towards our community to properly steer the public towards a better future. The new President of IStructE’s vision for this resonates quite a bit. Though we’re often contracted to provide the “most efficient/cost effective” designs, there is always room for education for our clients on the non-financial costs of certain design decisions. Before that, however, we ourselves must become more familiar with ramifications of our design and all of the alternatives that are available to us cough wood structures cough. Commit to the call to action here.

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My vision and call to action for our members - and colleagues in other professions that work with structural engineers – is to commit to evolving and expanding our mindset and skills now, acknowledging the global challenges before us, and our responsibility to contribute as individuals with unique professional skills.

Tanya de Hoog

Lightning Round

  • Google Gemini 1.5 might support up to 1 million tokens in the context window. Holy 🐄

  • RRSP deadline is coming up! Save on yo taxes one avocado toast at a time.

  • Continuing the chip saga, SoftBank, the company behind the $100B Vision Fund, is now seeking to raise another $100B to build an AI chip powerhouse.

Quick Tips

  • Career tip - strike a good balance between figuring out things for yourself and knowing when to ask the needed questions to those around you. So much engineering is also about collaboration and being able to work well with others - whether they are your coworkers, your contractors, clients, architects, etc.