Sora, the text-to-video platform announced by OpenAI in February 2024, has stirred awe and concern in the Chinese landscape. Yin Ye, CEO of BGI Group calls this the Newton moment of AI development. Sora has the potential to disrupt various sectors — advertising, education, entertainment and healthcare. Chinese experts are impressed by Sora’s capabilities to generate natural-looking videos, and seamless integration of text and video.

This has widened the gap between the USA and China in AI development. China’s LLMs have reached the GPT-3.5 capabilities. Thereafter GPT-4 has been released, and it shows a gap of 1.5 years between the current models of China and GPT-4 released in 2023.

Some Chinese entrepreneurs are not much impressed by the capabilities of Sora, and remark that it has yet to advance much to understand the world.

It is known that the US has imposed strict sanctions on the export of semiconductors to China. It prevents China from accessing the cutting-edge technology in AI. China cannot access even GPUs being made Nvidia.