Sora 2 strengthens new narrative: AI engulfs apps, Meta responds with a decline
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The recent surge of OpenAI's latest video generation model Sora 2 and its applications is fueling a powerful new narrative in the market: AI is preparing to devour and reshape the existing software application ecosystem.
On Tuesday, OpenAI officially released its most advanced video generation model to date, Sora 2.0, along with an iPhone application called “Sora by OpenAI”, aiming to bring AI video creation to the masses. Users can create and share AI-generated videos with friends.
Although the app is currently invite-only, it has quickly topped the Apple App Store charts. After the release of Sora 2, Meta's stock price dropped 2.3% in after-hours trading. According to Goldman Sachs’ market commentary, this is mainly due to concerns that Sora 2's powerful audio-visual generation capabilities may give rise to an entirely new social media ecosystem.
To investors, the emergence of Sora 2 is seen as a strong reaffirmation of the narrative that “AI/large language models (LLM) are devouring software/applications.”
A New Round of the AI Video War Begins
The launch of Sora 2 marks the start of a new arms race among tech giants in the AI-driven short video social field.
In fact, even before OpenAI took the spotlight with Sora, the battle over AI video apps had already begun. Participants in the AI field have been actively laying out plans, vying for a place in this emerging track called “AI-native social information feeds.”
Last August, Character.AI launched a feature called “Feed,” calling it “the world's first AI-native social information feed.” Soon after, Meta launched a feature named “Vibes” in its AI app in September.
Similar to Sora, these platforms focus on creator community–generated, endlessly scrollable short videos under 10 seconds, and encourage users to remix content. In addition, Midjourney has also launched a similar AI video web feed.
When releasing Feed, Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand called it “the world's first AI-native social feed” and declared that “the era of endless scrolling is over. We are ushering in an AI-driven future of entertainment.”
Why Can Sora Stand Out?
Despite entering the race a bit late, the Sora app quickly overtook competitors thanks to its outstanding productization capability and viral propagation effect.
First, Sora 2's success lies in its extremely simple user experience design. Compared to Meta's hastily released Vibes, OpenAI once again shows its strength in product design. The app allows users to easily create short videos under 10 seconds and insert themselves or friends into them.
This highly personalized and social-oriented design is seen as a smarter strategy than simple social tab pages, and is one of the reasons it rapidly exploded on social media.
By contrast, Meta's Vibes, released a few days earlier, was described as “half-finished,” with some users reporting a “confusing and unintuitive” experience.
“Discover, play, and share your imagination in an experimental community,” reads the Sora app’s App Store description. Some analysts point out that OpenAI is entering the social media business with a strategy similar to Facebook's early days, using an invitation system and cutting-edge content streams as a gateway.
“Infinite Waste” and Echoes of History
The explosive growth of AI video content has also sparked new concerns. One criticism labels these services as “infinite waste machines,” claiming that, after the flood of dubious-quality AI art, the internet will soon be inundated with massive amounts of AI video “waste.”
Deeper concerns point to environmental costs, as these services rely on huge data center computing power, resulting in significant energy consumption and carbon emissions.
However, from the perspective of tech industry development, the current pandemonium may just be a necessary stage, akin to the “Cambrian explosion” in biological evolution. During that period, the diversity of life forms rapidly increased, but most later disappeared in mass extinction events.
History shows that such technological proliferation usually leads to market concentration. The PC operating system boom of the 1980s ultimately gave way to Microsoft Windows; the flourishing of search engines in the 1990s ended with Google’s dominance.
This suggests that in any given field, ultimately only one product can “suck all the oxygen out of the room”—by virtue of having the best core technology or garnering the widest user recognition. This may foreshadow the rise of a single ultimate winner in today’s battle over AI video apps.
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