Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption

Summary

The App Store charts tell the story, at least for the first week of AI-generated video apps: This doesn’t, somewhat embarrassingly, match my initial impressions: I liked the Vibes addition to the MetaAI app and was somewhat cool on Sora. I spent much of last week’s episode of Sharp Tech exploring why my initial impressions were so off base, and I think M.G. Siegler — who was sucked into Sora immediately — captures a few of them in Sora’s Slop Hits Different: Anyway, what’s different, and what I underestimated about Sora, is that the AI content here is not just randomly generated things. It’s content that’s either loaded with “cameos” from your connections or it’s “real” world content that’s, well, hilarious. Not all of it, of course. But a lot of it! In this regard, it’s really not too dissimilar from TikTok — and back in the day, Vine! This is a lot more like those social networks but with the main difference being that it’s a lot easier to create such content thanks to AI. I think that’s the real revelation here. It’s less about consumption and more about creation. I previously wrote about how I was an early investor in Vine in part because it felt like it could be analogous to Instagram. Thanks in large part to filters, that app made it easy for anyone to think they were good enough to be a photographer. It didn’t matter if they were or not, they thought they were — I was one of them — so everyone posted their photos. Vine felt like it could have been that for video thanks to its clever tap-to-record mechanism. But actually, it became a network for a lot of really talented amateurs to figure out a new format for funny videos on the internet. When Twitter acquired the company and dropped the ball, TikTok took that idea and scaled it (thanks to ByteDance paying um, Meta billions of dollars for distribution, and their own very smart algorithms). In a way, Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator. I feel blessed for a whole host of reasons, many of th...