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[Editorial] How does change happen?

Haebom
Recently, the Text-to-Video (T2V) market has been heating up. As Runway was opening up a new horizon in the market, surpassing Text-to-Image (T2I) with Gen2, the field of T2V got even hotter when OpenAI unveiled Sora. I'm not a particularly special person, but I have some close connections in the AI industry, and a few actually work at those companies, so I heard some news that left a deep impression on me and taught me a lot, so I wanted to write about it.
How would you feel if, whatever you’re doing right now, a leading competitor or the most recognized player in the market suddenly jumped in? It’s the real-life version of the legendary questions from a certain VC years ago: "What will you do if Naver or Kakao starts doing OOO?" or "What if a big corporation enters your market?" In Korea, these things often lead to disputes over plagiarism or encroachment on small businesses, but the actual facts are left for the courts to decide. But what if you were the target?
지금 생각하면 사냥터가 다 니꺼냐 하면 할 말 없지만 이땐 왜인지 순순히 다른 곳으로 간 기억이 있습니다.
Usually, or rather, most people start to feel uneasy when someone follows them or tries to enter the territory they've already claimed. That's the typical response. Most worry they’ll get a smaller slice of the pie or that what they discovered first will lose its value. Some say it’s just a natural step for the market to grow. Those perspectives aren’t necessarily wrong, but what I heard was a really refreshing take—it was the response: "We weren’t wrong!"
When I take on a side project or start something new, I find it even more worthwhile if big names or elite groups are already in the market. After all, it's the result of their deep thought and hard work. I think it's also exciting to look for things that are unique to us—things they can’t do, but we might be able to—and give it a shot.
For startups working on T2V, seeing the performance and capabilities shown by OpenAI, the world’s current number one, wasn’t so much discouraging as it was affirmation—they became even more convinced that "we weren’t wrong!" and felt inspired. I was also struck by the atmosphere around Sora’s launch paper, which stated that synergy was achieved by combining diffusion models and transformers, and, since most of the lead authors were those who worked on DALLE-3, it felt like they finally found a breakthrough for problems that hadn’t been solved before.
Some people don’t like it when others enter their territory and try to reject them, but what if, instead of complaining or blaming, we choose the truly wise and constructive path—which is to think, "My perspective was right!" If a big corporation, competitor, or someone else enters your field, it just proves that there’s someone else out there with the same insight as you, and it’s not so bad to feel a little proud knowing you were leading the way in a field that now attracts big budget and top talent.
Honestly, I think every change or innovation starts from here. Not by rejection, but by acceptance—and thinking about how to digest and integrate it. No matter how good an opportunity or chance may be, if we can’t absorb it, it’s meaningless, and if we take it in the wrong way, it can lead us astray. Maybe it’s time we adopt a simple yet powerful way of thinking: to accept and encourage.
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I post articles related to IT 💻, economy 💰, and humanities 🎭.
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haebom@kakao.com
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