Sora AI, bicycles, and Meta disruption was published on Monday, October 6th, 2025. The app store charts tell the story, at least for the first week of AI-generated video apps. This somewhat embarrassingly matches my initial impressions. I liked the Vibes addition to the Meta AI 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 MG Siegler, who was sucked into Sora immediately, captures a few of them in 'Sora 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 quote-unquote cameos from your connections or it's quote-unquote 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 attempt-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 Meta billions of dollars for distribution and their very own smart algorithms. In a way, it sort of feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator.
I feel blessed for a whole host of reasons, many of them related to the fact I've been able to carve out a career as a creator. Sure, I call myself an analyst and I write about primarily big tech companies, but one thing I realized over the years is that the success of Stratechery is tied to it being a creative endeavor. There have been a lot of analysts over the years who have launched similar sites, but what was often missing was the narrative element. The best articles on Stratechery tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and the analysis is along for the ride. Analysis alone doesn't move the needle. That I tell stories is itself a function of the way I think. I have a larger meta story in my head about how the world works, and I'm always adding and augmenting that story. That's why in various interviews I've noted that being wrong is often the most inspiring, albeit painful, place to be. That means my story is incomplete, and I need to deepen my understanding of the world I'm seeking to chronicle. I certainly have that opportunity right now.
My creativity blind spot. This is what I wrote in my update about Sora. Quote: 'Indeed, it feels like each company has an entirely different target audience. YouTube is making tools for creators. Meta is building the ultimate lean-back, dreamlike experience. And OpenAI is making an app that is, in my estimation, the easiest for normal people to use. In this new competition, I prefer the Meta experience by a significant margin. And the reason why goes back to one of the oldest axioms in technology: the 90-9-1 rule. 90% of users consume, 9% of users edit/distribute, and 1% of users create. If you were to categorize the target market of these three AI video entrants, you might say that YouTube is focused on the 1% of creators, OpenAI is focused on the 9% of editors/distributors, Meta is focused on the 90% of users who consume. Speaking as someone who is, at least for now, more interested in consuming AI content than in distributing or creating it, I find Meta's Vibes app genuinely compelling, the Sora app feels like a parlor trick, if I'm being honest, and I tired of my feed pretty quickly. I'm going to refrain on passing judgment on YouTube given that my current primary YouTube use case is watching vocal coaches break down songs from K-pop demon hunters. I honestly have no idea if my evaluation of these apps is broadly applicable. As I've noted repeatedly, I'm hesitant to make any pronouncements about what resonates with society broadly, given that I am the weirdo in the room. Still, I do think it's striking how this target market evaluation tracks with the companies themselves. YouTube has always prioritized creators, while OpenAI's business model is predicated on people actively using AI. It's Meta that has stayed focused on the silent majority that simply consumes. And as a silent consumer, I still like Vibes.' End quote.
As I noted at the beginning, the verdict is in, and my evaluation of these apps is not broadly applicable. Way more people like Sora than Vibes, and OpenAI has another viral hit. What I hear from people who love the app, however, is very much in line with what Siegler wrote. Yes, they are browsing the feed, but the real lure is losing surprisingly large amounts of time making content. Sora lets them be a content creator. This was a blind spot for me because I don't have that itch. I'm creating content constantly—three articles/updates, an interview, and three podcast episodes a week is enough for me, thank you very much. When I am vegging out on my phone, I want to passively consume. And I personally found the Vibes mix of fantastical environments and beautiful visages calming and inspiring. Almost everyone else feels different. Katie Notopoulos posted on Threads: 'Me looking at Vibes feed: This is a screensaver. So boring. Why would anyone want it? Me looking at videos I made of my own face in Sora 2: Hehe I love this. It's funny. It's me.'
I had to laugh at this because I've spent way too much time watching Apple's aerial video screen savers. Apparently, my tastes are consistent. Beyond that, however, is a second blind spot. How much of the 90-9-1 rule is a law of the universe versus a manifestation of barriers when it comes to creation? At the risk of sounding like a snob, have I become the sort of 1%er who is totally out of touch?
The AI bicycle. Back in 2022, when AI image generation was just starting to get good, I wrote about the AI unbundling and the idea propagation chain. Quote: 'The idea propagation chain is creation, substantiation, duplication, distribution, and consumption. The evolution of human communication has been about removing whatever bottleneck is in this value chain. Before humans could write, information could only be conveyed orally. That meant that the creation, vocalization, delivery, and consumption of an idea were all one and the same. Writing, though, unbundled consumption, increasing the number of people who could consume an idea. Now the new bottleneck was duplication. To reach more people, whatever was written had to be painstakingly duplicated by hand, which dramatically limited what ideas were recorded and preserved. The printing press removed this bottleneck, dramatically increasing the number of ideas that could be economically distributed. The new bottleneck was distribution, which is to say that this was the new place to make money. Thus, the aforementioned profitability of newspapers. That bottleneck, though, was removed by the internet, which made distribution free and available to anyone. What remains is one final bundle: the creation and substantiation of an idea. To use myself as an example, I have plenty of ideas and thanks to the internet, the ability to distribute them around the globe. However, I still need to write them down, just as an artist needs to create an image or a musician needs to write a song. What is becoming increasingly clear, though, is that this too is a bottleneck that is on the verge of being removed.' End quote. This is what was unlocked by Sora. All sorts of people without the time or inclination or skills or equipment to make videos could suddenly do just that. And they absolutely loved it. And why wouldn't they? 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. So much so that I've done a complete 180 on Sora. This new app from OpenAI may be the single most exciting manifestation of AI yet and the most encouraging in terms of AI's impact on humans.
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? It reminds me of one of my favorite Steve Jobs moments just before he died at the introduction of the iPad 2. I wrote about it in 2024's 'The Great Flattening.' Quote: 'My favorite moment in that keynote, one of my favorite Steve Jobs keynote moments ever, in fact, was the introduction of GarageBand. You can watch the entire introduction and demo, but the part that stands out in my memory is Jobs, clearly sick in retrospect, moved by what the company had just produced.'
