OpenAI Made Video Creation Effortless—Here’s What Happened Next

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Sam Altman is here. Sam Altman is there. Sam Altman is whispering in your ear.

He’s also stealing GPUs from a Target, barbecuing prawns at a company retreat, and co-starring in a sitcom with your best friend.

I, for one, would like a day—just one—without Sam Altman in my feed. But that looks highly unlikely in the near future because of Sora 2.

OpenAI’s new flagship video-and-audio model launched a couple of weeks ago, and now everyone’s starring in AI-generated videos of themselves—along with, apparently, Sam Altman.

Sora 2 is OpenAI’s first new video model since the release of Sora Turbo almost a year ago. On the same day it released Sora 2, OpenAI also released an invitation-only social iOS app, also called Sora, that’s powered by the new model. If you grant the app permission to use a recording of your face and voice, your friends can drop you into their videos as a “cameo”—and you can return the favor. Another popular feature, “remix,” lets users build on each other’s clips: You can take a video your friend generated and put your own spin on it.

Think of it as Instagram for your AI self. Instead of sun-drenched selfies and pictures of brunch, your feed is full of videos of you and your friends in all kinds of wacky invented situations—like having a horse ride them on the moon or approaching Altman—yes, him again—at OpenAI’s DevDay.

You can access Sora at sora.com, via the Sora iPhone app, and, per OpenAI’s announcement at DevDay, in the API. Read on for a look at what people on the Every team think about Sora, along with the most interesting takes from across the internet.

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What everyone at Every is thinking

Sora stands out because it’s the first video model that can tell a story—and invite you in

“Sora feels like the first truly entertainment/storytelling generative model, not just visually, but narratively… What sets it apart isn’t just the output, it’s how the input works—unlike other models where the burden of creativity sits on the prompt, Sora takes that load off you. You can throw in a vague prompt, like ‘Make me a funny video,’ and the model somehow figures out the story beats, characters, and flow. The underlying prompt system feels invisible, like there’s a hidden narrative engine that interprets intent rather than instruction. That also makes it a black box; you never really know what’s happening behind the scenes, which can feel frustrating but it’s also part of the magic.”—Lucas Crespo, creative lead

The only generative video model that’s full of your friends

“And the Cameos feature adds a social layer that makes it way more alive: Now you can co-star with friends, remix each other’s stories, and build worlds together. At its best, Sora isn’t just generating clips, it’s improvising stories. It’s the first videogen model that feels like it’s directing instead of just rendering.”—Lucas

Making polished product videos just got easier

“I found the character consistency on Sora incredible. I also found it was great to make short product ads, demos, and trailers. I gave it brief prompts and it generated surprisingly polished product videos. I made a lot of videos of breakdancing, flipping, jumping—different kinds of complex physical movements—and it got all of them right. I was impressed!”—Anukshi Mittal, project manager

Sora expands what you can imagine—and create

“Using generative AI, and especially Sora, makes me think more vivid, creative thoughts, like having more vivid dreams. When you can create anything you ever thought of, it expands your imagination. It helps embed content into the cultural zeitgeist, and the trends are interesting, [for example,] on day one there were a lot of Costco ads, Pokemon, South Park, and Sam Altman’s cameo. But there are aspects of the ‘slop’ I don’t love, and there will be new ramifications around copyright.”—Alex Duffy, cofounder and CEO of Good Start Labs

“I found value in pushing my brain to think of things and then creating them—not even [for] the end product, more [for the process of thinking about], ‘Hey, if we live in a world where you can do anything, what do you want?’ It's like getting ready for the future. This is for video, but [the moment will come] for music, software, planning a vacation, maybe immersing yourself in any environment. I'm not really looking at it daily, but I do think the ability to make videos of myself and friends is a strong one, and it will definitely find its way into other social apps.”—Kieran Klaassen, general manager of Cora

OpenAI is spending big to keep Sora simple

“It's not necessarily that much better as a video generator than Veo 3 from Google, but it is way easier to use. They let anyone with an invite make up to five videos at the same time, later reducing that number to two, so they must be burning a lot of cash.”—Alex

Without creative control, Sora risks sliding into slop

“I do feel very drained after using it. I can feel the brain rot as I scroll; it often isn’t very useful content, just pure entertainment. There’s not a lot of control, which would enable people to tell really great stories. You can’t set the script. You can upload an image and have it animate [the image], but it doesn’t do a very good job. You can’t continue videos well, so it’s stuck in a 10‑second form factor and isn’t conducive to high‑quality content. It almost feels like Vine for the AI era.”—Alex

“I’d love to see more control so artists could actually use it. I think in its current form because there’s no control, it [generates] slop. I feel strongly that the more control [creators on the platform have], the less it’s slop.”—Alex

“Despite [features like character consistency] I got bored after a few days and stopped checking [the app]... A lot of the content on the platform already feels sloppy and repetitive—very AI-generated in tone and texture…I don’t think it’ll become the next social media platform… it’s powerful and creative, but feels more like a tool for content generation than a community people return to regularly, right now at least."—Anukshi

What everyone else is thinking

Sora turns cutting-edge tech into something anyone can use

Sora 2 left indie hacker Pieter Levels "very very very" impressed. His TL;DR: “OpenAI essentially took a lot of stuff that was already technically possible, then added new things that weren't possible yet, and then put it all together in a very friendly interface that even my mom can use, with generation times of just a few minutes which is extremely fast if you think of the pipeline behind it (multiple video generation + voice + audio etc.).” Among the new features, Levels calls out character consistency in generated videos—something he says pushes Sora to the front of the pack, ahead of both Chinese video models and Google’s Veo 3. That’s a particularly interesting perspective coming from someone bootstrapping an AI photo app himself.

OpenAI made creating just as fun as consuming

Writer and investor M.G. Siegler said of the iOS app Sora that he found it "nearly impossible" to put down. In his newsletter, he wrote about OpenAI’s ability to make genuinely fun products out of AI, noting that the cameos from your friends, and content that includes people and characters from the real world, made Sora feel similar to TikTok—the main difference being that “it’s a lot easier to create such content thanks to AI.” He adds, “I think that’s the real revelation here. It’s less about consumption and more about creation.”

The trade-off between infinite slop and infinite creativity

Stratechery writer Ben Thompson was, by his own admission, initially “somewhat cool on Sora,” but he’s since changed his mind, now calling OpenAI’s new app “perhaps the single most exciting manifestation of AI yet, and the most encouraging in terms of AI’s impact on humans.” He explains: “To be creative is to be truly human—to actually think of something yourself, instead of simply passively consuming—and AI makes creativity as accessible as a simple prompt. I think this is pretty remarkable.”

While he doesn’t dismiss the risk of AI slop, Thompson sees it as a trade-off of sorts: “Everyone—including lots of people in my Sora feed—are leaning into the concept of AI slop, which I get: we are looking at a world of infinite machine-generated content, and a lot of it is going to be terrible. At the same time, how incredible is it to give everyone with an iPhone a creative outlet?”

Sora turns prompting into play

Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore tweeted that the ability to remix other’s videos is what makes Sora so sticky: “You can take a clip that someone else generated and prompt changes, which feels like riffing with friends. And you eliminate most of the work around prompting, which is kind of genius. Many people don't use video models today because they don't know what to create. Here, you can scroll until you get inspired.”

A video model that gets the details right

Sora’s ability to replicate even obscure details from things in the real world left the anonymous hacker Pliny—known for jailbreaking models—"legitimately mind-blo[wn]." He prompted the model to “generate gameplay of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 with the Basilisk Tank and Panam” and it only got two small details in the game wrong.

A powerful tool stuck in a dull loop

Writer Ethan Mollick seems impressed by the technology itself, less so by how people are using it: “Sora 2 is incredibly impressive as a video generator but pushed into a narrow niche: 1) Optimized for viral short form video, both in UX & output 2) Built to be one-and-done, when most video gen is selecting among variants 3) Makes fun stuff the first time, at the cost of control.” He followed up with a scathing take about how doomscrolling flattens our creativity: “Scrolling the Sora 2 video stream just reinforces this truth from AI image generators —when given a tool that can make anything, people basically just make videos of cats, celebrities & anime characters (also Sam Altman). A feed that highlighted creativity might look different.”

Rhea Purohit is a contributing writer for Every focused on research-driven storytelling in tech. You can follow her on X at @RheaPurohit1 and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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