OpenAI launches Sora, an AI video social network, as Meta answers with Vibes

OpenAI has launched a social network built around short AI-generated videos. Sora is an iOS app for creating and sharing 10-second AI clips in a feed deliberately styled on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

Powered by the new Sora 2 model, the app is rolling out by invitation only in the US and Canada.

Its most talked-about feature is cameos: users submit a one-time video and audio clip to verify their identity and capture their appearance, then can give other users permission to generate videos featuring their AI likeness, including multi-person scenes. OpenAI claims cameos reproduce appearance and voice with striking fidelity, and calls a social app built around the feature the best way to experience the new model.

The concept unsettles many. Letting strangers generate realistic videos of your face raises obvious consent and misuse questions, even with identity verification, and critics ask who has time for yet another feed of synthetic content.

Early community reaction has been split. Some invoke the classic hype cycle and warn a fall is coming. Others call the app something the world does not need and a waste of computing power and energy. A smaller group is simply excited, while another camp says the steady infusion of AI into social platforms makes them want to be less social, describing the launch as jumping the shark.

The launch lands amid predictions from some entrepreneurs that as much as 90 percent of online content will be AI-created by 2027, with content becoming a commodity and community the only durable moat left for creators.

Meta had answered days earlier with Vibes, a feed of short-form AI-generated videos inside its Meta AI app and website. Coverage of Vibes has been brutal, dismissing it as an endless scroll of AI slop that nobody asked for, and the timing suggests Meta knew Sora was coming.

Separately, Meta will introduce an ad-free subscription for Facebook and Instagram in the United Kingdom, after fresh regulatory guidance and lengthy discussions with the UK's data protection regulator. UK users will choose between continuing free with personalized ads or paying 2.99 pounds a month on the web, or 3.99 pounds on iOS and Android, to stop seeing ads, with the price covering the first Meta account.