Sora hits 1 million downloads in five days
Interest in Sora, OpenAI’s latest app, is soaring despite being invite-only and limited to the US and Canada. OpenAI’s Sora head Bill Peebles said in a tweet that the company is working hard to keep up with the surprising demand.
sora hit 1M app downloads in <5 days, even faster than chatgpt did (despite the invite flow and only targeting north america!)!
team working hard to keep up with surging growth. more features and fixes to overmoderation on the way!— Bill Peebles (@billpeeb) October 9, 2025
OpenAI launched its latest iOS app on September 30. Sora feels like an AI version of TikTok, allowing users to scroll through a feed of 10-second AI-generated videos and create their own realistic clips.
Videos are generated with OpenAI’s new Sora 2 model and can feature the likeness of users who have uploaded a “cameo”. That’s Sora’s feature, which allows you to use your likeness when prompting the app to generate videos. Users can also generate videos with the “cameos” of their friends and other users who have opted to make their “cameos” public.
Fun but problematic
OpenAI says that Sora is available only with invites because its goal is to be used with friends. And that makes sense. It’s fun to be able to generate absurd videos featuring you and your friends in all sorts of weird situations, and then share them in a feed that’s exclusively filled with deepfakes.
However, shortly after its release, Sora was filled with content that clearly infringed on copyright. That raised questions about the content AI used to train its video-generating models and prompted pushback from rightsholders and changes to the app.
Welcome to the age of slop
I am not surprised that people are so captivated by the idea of Sora, nor by how quickly problems have started popping up. While making fun videos of your friends is cute, AI slop is not. I don’t know about you, but I prefer watching real people doing real things, so if Sora becomes the norm, I’ll probably stay even less on social media.
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