Everyone is doing image generation. Its realtivly easy and I would say it would be a people mover if openai wouldn't support this.

So they need to be able to do image generation, for which they need image data. They also need to be able to analyze videos for more and better training data like learning or teaching there models from yt and other sources.

So they have image generation, image dataset and video dataset. Its not far fetched ata ll or desperate to leverage this base for playing around with video generation.

And despite how much money they burn, for a company that size, trying out video generation wasn't that high of a goal post.

I'm really surprised by there move and can only imagine that the progress of other models from google and antrophic pulls their teeth and no longer want to invest the compute (not money) to leverage their compute for their main models.