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 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.
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 dream-like 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
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 KPop 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!
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:
I had to laugh at this because I’ve spent way too much time watching Apple’s Aerial Video screensavers; 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?
Back in 2022, when AI image generation was just starting to get good, I wrote about The AI Unbundling and the idea propagation chain:
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 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.
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:
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:
I’m blown away with this stuff. Playing your own instruments, or using the smart instruments, anyone can make music now, in something that’s this thick and weighs 1.3 pounds. It’s unbelievable. GarageBand for iPad. Great set of features — again, this is no toy. This is something you can really use for real work. This is something that, I cannot tell you, how many hours teenagers are going to spend making music with this, and teaching themselves about music with this.
Jobs wasn’t wrong: global hits have originated on GarageBand, and undoubtedly many more hours of (mostly terrible, if my personal experience is any indication) amateur experimentation. Why I think this demo was so personally meaningful for Jobs, though, is that not only was GarageBand about music, one of his deepest passions, but it was also a manifestation of his life’s work: creating a bicycle for the mind.
I remember reading an Article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been in Scientific American, where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B, and the condor won: it came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation.
But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders, and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes, and so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool, very early stages, and we’ve come only a very short distance, and it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes, but I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next 100 years.
In Jobs’ view of the world, teenagers the world over are potential musicians, who might not be able to afford a piano or guitar or trumpet; if, though, they can get an iPad — now even thinner and lighter! — they can have access to everything they need. In this view “There’s an app for that” is profoundly empowering.
Well, now there’s an AI for that, and it’s accessible to everyone. And yes, I get the objections. I slave over these posts, thinking carefully about the structure and every word choice; it seems cheap to ask an LLM to generate the same. I’m certain that artists feel the same about AI images, or musicians about AI music, or YouTube and TikTok creators about Sora videos; what about the craft?
That, though, is an easy concern to have when you already have a creative outlet; it’s also easy to make the case that more content means more compelling content to consume, even if the percentage of what is great is very small.
What I didn’t fully appreciate, however, is what falls in the middle: the fact that so many more people get to be creators, and what a blessing that is. How many people have had ideas in their head, yet were incapable of substantiating them, and now can? I myself benefited greatly from the last unbundling — the ability for anyone to distribute content; why should I begrudge the latest unbundling, and the many more people who will benefit from AI substantiation of their creative impulses? Bicycles for all!
Siegler in his post discussed how he once thought Vine could be like Instagram, which made it easy to feel like a good photographer with its filters, but that was only step one; Chris Dixon described Instagram’s evolution as Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network:
A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.
Here are two historical examples: 1) Delicious. The single-player tool was a cloud service for your bookmarks. The multiplayer network was a tagging system for discovering and sharing links. 2) Instagram. Instagram’s initial hook was the innovative photo filters. At the time some other apps like Hipstamatic had filters but you had to pay for them. Instagram also made it easy to share your photos on other networks like Facebook and Twitter. But you could also share on Instagram’s network, which of course became the preferred way to use Instagram over time.
Dixon wrote that post in 2015, and Instagram has since gone much further than that, as I documented in 2021’s Instagram’s Evolution:
There was the tool to network evolution that Dixon talked about.
The second evolution was the addition of video.
The third evolution was the introduction of the algorithmic feed.
The fifth evolution was what I was writing about in that Article: the commitment to short-form video, driven by competition with TikTok.
That last evolution is fully baked in at this point; late last month Instagram announced that it was changing Instagram’s navigation to focus on private messaging and Reels; I didn’t explicitly cover the 2013 addition of Instagram Direct, but it certainly is the case that messaging is where social networking happens today. What is public is pure entertainment, where the content you see is pulled from across the network and tailored for you specifically.
I think this evolution was both necessary and inevitable; I first wrote that Facebook needed to move in this direction in 2015’s Facebook and the Feed:
Consider Facebook’s smartest acquisition, Instagram. The photo-sharing service is valuable because it is a network, but it initially got traction because of filters. Sometimes what gets you started is only a lever to what makes you valuable. What, though, lies beyond the network? That was Facebook’s starting point, and I think the answer to what lies beyond is clear: the entire online experience of over a billion people. Will Facebook seek to protect its network — and Zuckerberg’s vision — or make a play to be the television of mobile?
It wasn’t until TikTok peeled off a huge amount of attention that Facebook finally realized that viewing itself as a social network was actually limiting its potential. If the goal was to monopolize user attention — the only scarce resource on the Internet — then artificially limiting what people saw to their social network was to fight with one hand tied behind your back; TikTok was taking share not just because of its format, but also because it wasn’t really a social network at all.
This is all interesting context for how OpenAI characterized Sora in their introductory post: it’s a social app.
Today, we’re launching a new social iOS app just called “Sora,” powered by Sora 2. Inside the app, you can create, remix each other’s generations, discover new videos in a customizable Sora feed, and bring yourself or your friends in via cameos. With cameos, you can drop yourself straight into any Sora scene with remarkable fidelity after a short one-time video-and-audio recording in the app to verify your identity and capture your likeness…
This app is made to be used with your friends. Overwhelming feedback from testers is that cameos are what make this feel different and fun to use — you have to try it to really get it, but it is a new and unique way to communicate with people. We’re rolling this out as an invite-based app to make sure you come in with your friends. At a time when all major platforms are moving away from the social graph, we think cameos will reinforce community.
First, just because Meta needed to move beyond the social network doesn’t mean social networking isn’t still valuable, or appealing. As an analogy, consider the concept of a pricing umbrella: when something becomes more expensive, it opens up the market for a lower-priced competitor. In this case Instagram’s evolution has created a social umbrella: sure, Instagram content may be “better” by virtue of being pulled from anywhere, but that means there is now a space for a content app that is organized around friends.
Second, remember the creativity point above: one of the challenges of restricting Instagram content to just what your social network posted is that your social network may not post very many interesting things. That gap was initially filled by following influencers, but now Instagram simply goes out and finds what you are interested in without having to do anything. In Sora, however, your network is uniquely empowered to be creative, increasing the amount of interesting content in a network-mediated context (and, of course, Sora is also pulling from elsewhere as well to populate your feed).
What you’re seeing, if you squint, is disruption: Instagram has gone “up-market” in terms of content, leaving space for a new entrant; that new entrant, meanwhile, is not simply cheaper/smaller. Rather, it’s enabled by a new technological paradigm that lets it compete orthogonally with the incumbent. Granted, that new paradigm is very expensive, particularly compared to the content that Instagram gets for free, but the extent it restores value to your social network is notable.
I am on the record as being very bullish about the impact of AI on Meta’s business:
It’s good for their ad business in the short, medium, and long-term (and YouTube’s as well).
More content benefits the company with the most popular distribution channels.
AI will be the key to unlocking both AR and VR.
The key to everything, however, is maintaining the hold Meta has on user attention, and the release of both Vibes and Sora has me seriously questioning point number two.
One of the reasons why AI slop is so annoying is — paradoxically — the fact that a lot of it has gotten quite good. That means that when consuming content you have to continually be ascertaining if what you see is real or AI-generated; to put it in the terms of the Article I just quoted, you might want to lean back, but if you don’t want to be taken in or make a fool of yourself then you have to constantly be leaning forward to figure out what is or isn’t AI.
What this means for Vibes is the fact it is unapologetically and explicitly all AI is quite profound: it’s a true lean-back experience, where the fact none of it is real is a point of interest and — if Holz is right — inspiration and imagination. I find it quite relaxing to consume, in a way I don’t find almost any other feed on my phone.
The reason this is problematic for Meta (and YouTube) is that I’m not sure the company can counter Sora — or any other AI-generated content app that appears — in the same way they countered Snapchat and TikTok. Both challengers introduced new formats — Stories in the case of Instagram, and short-form video in the case of TikTok — but the content was still produced by humans; that made it much more palatable to stuff those formats into Instagram.
AI might be different: Meta certainly has data on this question, but I could imagine a scenario where users are actually annoyed and turned off by mixing AI-generated content with human content — and because Instagram isn’t really a social network anymore, the fact that that content might be made by or include your friends might not be enough. Implicit in this observation is the fact that I don’t think that human content is going anywhere; there just might be a smaller percentage of time devoted to it, and that’s a problem for a company predicated on marshaling attention.
The second issue for Meta is that their AI capabilities simply don’t match OpenAI, or Google’s for that matter. It’s clear that Meta knows this is the case — look no further than this summer’s hiring spree and total overhaul of their AI approach — but creating something like Sora is a lot more difficult than copying Stories or short-form video. I imagine this shortcoming will be rectified, but Sora is in the market now.
I also think that it is fair to raise some questions about point three. I have been a vocal proponent of AI being the key to the Metaverse, but my tastes in content may not be very broadly applicable! I loved Vibes because to me it felt like virtual reality, but if it was virtual reality, and no one liked it, maybe the concept actually isn’t that appealing? Time will tell, but I do keep coming back to the social aspects of Sora: people like the real world, and they like people they know, and virtual reality in particular just might not be that broadly popular.
It turns out I was right last quarter that Meta had a lot of room to increase Reels monetization, but not just because they could target ads better (that was a part of it, as I noted above): rather, it turns out that short-form video is so addictive that Meta can simply drive more engagement — and thus more ad inventory — by pushing more of it. That’s impression driver number one — and the most important one. The second one is even more explicit: Meta simply started showing more ads to people (i.e. “ad load optimization”).
All of this ties back to where I started, about how Meta learned that you have to give investors short term results to get permission for long term investments. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in the same quarter where Meta decided to very publicly up its investment in the speculative “Superintelligence”, users got pushed more Reels and Facebook users in particular got shown more ads. The positive spin on this is that Meta has dials to turn; by the same token, investors who have flipped from intrinsically doubting Meta to intrinsically trusting them should realize that it was the pre-2022 Meta, the one that regularly voiced the importance of not pushing too many ads in order to preserve the user experience, that actually deserved the benefit of the doubt for growth that was purely organic. This last quarter is, to my mind, a bit more pre-determined.
As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
Meta’s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.
This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s worth being honest about today’s reality: Meta’s financial fortunes, at least for now, are in fact tied up in a centralized content engine that gives users “a dole of its output”; it’s nice from an investor perspective that Meta can turn the dials and get people to spend that much more time in Instagram. I for one can’t say that I feel particularly great when I’m done watching Reels for longer than I planned, and it’s certainly not a creative endeavor on my part — that’s for the content creators.
OpenAI, meanwhile, with both ChatGPT and Sora, is in fact placing easily accessible tools in people’s hands today, first with text and now with video. And, as I noted above, I actually find it exciting precisely because of the possibility that many more people are on the verge of discovering a creativity streak they didn’t even know they had, now that AI is available to substantiate it. So much Meta optimism is, paradoxically, pessimistic about the human condition; it may be the case that, to the extent that AI makes humans better, is the extent that Meta faces disruption.
