Weekend roundup; expanded Sora, security research and the battle for India

Sora 2 expands, is now available without invite codes
Following the massive success of the Sora 2 video generator, OpenAI is opening up the service for those without invite codes in the USA, Canada, Japan and Korea «for a limited time.» Simultaneously, they are announcing reusable characters that can feature in more than one video and an easier way to stitch videos together. If that wasn’t enough, OpenAI is adding more video generations for power users hitting the 30-per-day generation limits and letting them pay for more gens. They are also musing about letting rightsholders get compensation for the reuse of their characters, as a means of getting paid for your work on the platform. They do warn that 30 gens needs too many GPUs and will be throttled at some stage.
More at: MacRumors and a Twitter announcement, list of available countries.

OpenAI reveals security research agent in beta
The new agent, Aardvark, will look through code repositories at scale almost like a human would, and find errors and exploits before the bad guys do. It will continually analyze your source code and find vulnerabilities. The agent has already been used to find «numerous» vulnerabilities in open source software, and OpenAI will provide pro bono scanning to «select, non-commercial» OSS systems. Aardvark is not being widely released, existing instead as a private beta inside OpenAI’s offices, kind of like Google’s CodeMender.
More at OpenAI’s announcement and ZDNet.

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Google and OpenAI battle it out in India
Google has announced a free offer of Gemini Pro to subscribers of the mobile operator Jio Reliance in India. That includes 18 months of free access to the AI Pro plan, offering Gemini 2.5 Pro, Nano Bana and Veo 3.1. Reliance is the largest telco in India, and the third largest in the world, with some 506 million users. The plans would normally cost around $22. At the same time, OpenAI is hot on the heels with their massively popular ChatGPT Go product, offering a year of free access across all of India — which consists of about ten times the queries, image generations and file uploads. This plan is normally around $5/month.
More at TechCrunch (Gemini), Analytics India Mag and TechCrunch (ChatGPT Go)

Nvidia and Oracle to build supercomputer for Department of Energy
The computer, named Solstice, will be the most powerful computer for the DoE yet — with 100,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, and will be joined by a smaller system called Equinox, featuring 10K Blackwells. The machines will «accelerate the DOE’s mission of driving technological leadership across U.S. security, science and energy applications,» Nvidia says. The systems will together deliver 2,200 exaflops of power to the DOEs researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and will deliver «agentic AI workflows for scientific discovery» in a show of just how much power you can get out of 100k Nvidia chips. It should be up and running in 2026.
Read more at Nvidia’s press release and the DoE press release.