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OpenAI teases 12 days of mystery product launches starting tomorrow

OpenAI's "12 days of shipmas" will reveal new AI releases and demos for two weeks.

Benj Edwards – | 77
Retro tin toy santa robot holding christmas present
Credit: ThomasVogel via Getty Images
Credit: ThomasVogel via Getty Images

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a "12 days of OpenAI" period starting December 5, which will unveil new AI features and products for 12 consecutive weekdays.

Altman did not specify the exact features or products OpenAI plans to unveil, but a report from The Verge about this "12 days of shipmas" event suggests the products may include a public release of the company's text-to-video model Sora and a new "reasoning" AI model similar to o1-preview. Perhaps we may even see DALL-E 4 or a new image generator based on GPT-4o's multimodal capabilities.

Altman's full tweet included hints at releases both big and small:

🎄🎅starting tomorrow at 10 am pacific, we are doing 12 days of openai.

each weekday, we will have a livestream with a launch or demo, some big ones and some stocking stuffers.

we’ve got some great stuff to share, hope you enjoy! merry christmas.

Ars Video

 

If we're reading the calendar correctly, 12 weekdays means a new announcement every day until December 20.

Prior to Altman's tweet, OpenAI employees had earlier dropped hints on X about the upcoming releases. Sora lead Bill Peebles replied to a post from a colleague named "roon" about OpenAI being "unbelievably back" with a one-word confirmation: "Correct."

A full release of the "o1" reasoning model has been highly anticipated among the AI community, and it's seen by many industry pundits as a critical move to potentially place OpenAI ahead of competitors like Google and Anthropic.

On the other hand, the potential upcoming launch of Sora comes with some controversy. Artists who tested the model through an invite-only research preview recently leaked it in protest, claiming OpenAI used them for "unpaid R&D and PR." Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told The Wall Street Journal in March that Sora would become available by the end of 2024.

Google has positioned itself to compete with Sora by releasing its own video-generation model called Veo in a private preview. The company now offers Veo to businesses through its Vertex AI platform. We first covered Veo in May, three months after OpenAI announced Sora.

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Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter
Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.
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