The part where they gave us a new and improved video generator? Great, love it.
The part where they gave us a new social network dedicated purely to short form AI videos? Not great, Bob. Don’t be evil.
OpenAI is claiming they are making their social network with an endless scroll of 10-second AI videos the Actively Good, pro-human version of The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine, that helps you achieve your goals and can be easily customized and favors connection and so on. I am deeply skeptical.
They also took a bold copyright stance, with that stance being, well, not quite ‘fyou,’ but kind of close? You are welcome to start flagging individual videos. Or you can complain to them more generally about your characters and they say they can ‘work with you,’ which they clearly do in some cases, but the details are unclear.
As opposed to their deepfake rule for public figures, which is a highly reasonable opt-in rule where they need to give their permission.
Thus, a post in three acts.
You can access Sora either at Sora.com or via the Sora iPhone app. You need an invite to be part of the new social network, because that’s how the cool kids get you excited for a new app these days.
I am going mostly off reports of others but was also able to get access.
It’s a good video generation model, sir. Quite excellent, even. I’m very impressed.
It is not yet in the API, but it will be soon.
As always, all official examples you see will be heavily cherry picked. Assume these are, within the context in question, the best Sora 2 can do.
Those you see on social media from other sources, or on the Sora app, are still heavily selected in various ways. Usually they are the coolest, funniest and best creations, but also they are the creations that most most blatantly violate copyright, or are the most violent or sexual or otherwise might be unwise to create, or simply have the most hilarious fails. They’re not a representative sample.
When I tried creating a few things, it was still impressive, but as you’d expect it doesn’t nail the whole thing reliably or anything like that, and it doesn’t always fully follow instructions. I also got a content violation for ‘a time lapse of a Dyson sphere being built set to uplifting music.’
It is also easy to not appreciate how much progress is being made, or that previously difficult problems are being solved, because where there aren’t problems the lack of problems, and the previous failures, become invisible.
Netflix and Meta stock were each down a few percent, presumably on the news.
Sora 2 claims to be a big update on several fronts simultaneously:
Able to handle movements impossible for previous models.
Much better adherence to the laws of physics.
In particular, no longer ‘overoptimistic,’ meaning it won’t break physics to make the desired outcome happen, instead events will unfold naturally.
Strongly controllability, ability to follow intricate instructions.
Excels at styles, including realistic, cinematic, claymation and anime.
Creates sophisticated soundscapes and talk to match the video.
Insert any person, animal or object into any video.
You can, in particular, upload yourself via your camera.
That’s all very cool. The sample videos show impressive command of physics.
Based on reactions so far, they seem to be delivering on all of it.
They are also ‘responsibly’ launching a new social iOS app called Sora where you can share all these generated videos. Oh no. Hold that thought until Act 3.
The talk is even bigger in terms of the predicted impact and reception.
Sam Altman: Excited to launch Sora 2! Video models have come a long way; this is a tremendous research achievement.
Sora is also the most fun I’ve had with a new product in a long time. The iOS app is available in the App Store in the US and Canada; we will expand quickly.
I did not expect such fun dynamics to emerge from being able to “put yourself and your friends in videos” but I encourage you to check it out!
ChatGPT Pro subscribers can generate with Sora 2 Pro.
This feels to many of us like the “ChatGPT for creativity” moment, and it feels fun and new. There is something great about making it really easy and fast to go from idea to result, and the new social dynamics that emerge.
Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase. Even in the very early days of playing with Sora, it’s been striking to many of us how open the playing field suddenly feels.
In particular, the ability to put yourself and your friends into a video—the team worked very hard on character consistency—with the cameo feature is something we have really enjoyed during testing, and is to many of us a surprisingly compelling new way to connect.
I would take the other side of that bet. I am not here for it.
So no, this is not a full perfect physics engine, but that is now the standard by which we are judging video generation. The horse can talk, except it needs to fix its accent.
Solo: I asked Sora 2 to create a 90s Toy Ad of Epstein’s Island.
Sora does a good job creating exactly what you would want a video generation tool to do here. It’s speech, people should be able to say and make things.
OpenAI is currently doing a good job, by all reports, of not allowing images of real people in its videos without explicit consent, so they are if anything being overly cautious about avoiding deepfake problems. Some rivals will presumably be far less scrupulous here. There are big copyright and related issues around creation of derivative works of fiction, but that’s a very different problem.
I continue to be bullish in terms of worries about deepfakes and use of AI video and images as propaganda. My continued model here, as I’ve said several times, is that misinformation is primarily a demand-side problem, not a supply-side problem. The people yearn for misinformation, to hold up signs that mostly say hurray for our side, in whatever format.
However, it is worth a ponder of the bear case. The tools are rapidly improving. Both image and video generation models are much better than they were in 2024 prior to the election.
Steven Adler: I think the world probably declared victory too early on “AI’s election impacts were overblown”
Notably, GPT-4o image wildness wasn’t released until after the 2024 election, and once released was promptly used for propaganda.
The better bear case, the one I do worry about, is how AI video will create doubt about real video, giving carte blanche to people to call anything ‘fake news.’
I notice this starting in my own head already when scrolling Twitter. Post Sora, my instinct when I see a video is no longer to presume it is ‘real’ because there is a good chance it isn’t, until I see enough to be confident either way.
Similarly, Gary Marcus warns us again of Slopocalypse Now, or the ‘Imminent Enshittifcation of the Internet’ as AI versions overwhelm other content everywhere. Making the slop ‘better’ makes this problem worse. Mostly I remain an optimist that at least the wise among us can handle it where it matters most, but it will require constant vigilance.
So mostly this part is a straightforward congratulations to the team, great job everyone, I don’t have access yet but it sure looks like you did the thing.
On to Act 2.
Remember when we used to talk about whether image models or video models were training on copyrighted data, and whether that was going to land them in hot water?
You’d see (for example) Gary Marcus create an image of Mario, and then smugly say ‘hey look this was trained on Super Mario Brothers!’ as if there was any actual doubt it had been trained on Super Mario Brothers, and no one was really denying this but they weren’t technically admitting it either.
We are very much past that point. They trained on everything. Everyone trains on everything. That’s not me knowing anything or having official confirmation. That’s me observing what the models can do.
Sora 2 will outright replicate videos and use whatever characters you’d like, and do it pretty well, even for relatively obscure things.
How the FUCK does Sora 2 have such a perfect memory of this Cyberpunk side mission that it knows the map location, biome/terrain, vehicle design, voices, and even the name of the gang you’re fighting for, all without being prompted for any of those specifics??
Sora basically got two details wrong, which is that the Basilisk tank doesn’t have wheels (it hovers) and Panam is inside the tank rather than on the turret. I suppose there’s a fair amount of video tutorials for this mission scattered around the internet, but still––it’s a SIDE mission!
the full prompt for this was: “generate gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077 with the Basilisk Tank and Panam.”
This is actually a rather famous side mission, at least as these things go. Still.
Max Woolf: Getting annoyed at the QTs on this: the mind-blowing part isn’t the fact that it’s trained on YouTube data (which is the poster is very well aware), the mind-blowing part is that it achieved that level of recall with a very simple prompt which is very very unusual.
Everyone already assumed that Sora was trained on YouTube, but “generate gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077 with the Basilisk Tank and Panam” would have generated incoherent slop in most other image/video models, not verbatim gameplay footage that is consistent.
Pliny:
I’m totally fine with that part. The law plausibly is fine with it as well, in terms of the training, although I am curious how the Anthropic settlement and ruling translates to a video setting.
For books, the law seems to be that you need to own a copy, but then training is fair game although extensive regurgitation of the text is not.
How does that translate to video? I don’t know. One could argue that this requires OpenAI to own a copy of any and all training data, which in some cases is not a thing that OpenAI can get to own. It could get tricky.
Tricker is the constant creation of derivative works, which Sora is very, very good at.
One of the coolest things about all the copyright infringement is that Sora consistently nails not only the images but also the voices of all the characters ever.
Cartman calls a Waymo, yes Eric’s third eye is an annoying error in that video although it doesn’t appear in the others. Yes I agree with Colin Fraser that it ‘looks like s’ but (apart from the third eye that wouldn’t be there on most rerolls) only because it looks and sounds exactly like actual South Park. The biggest issue is that Kenny’s voice in the second clip is insufficiently garbled. Here’s one of them playing League of Legends and a longer clip of them being drafted to go off to war.
I don’t know how well you can specify and script the clips, but it’s entirely plausible you could produce a real South Park or other episode with this, potentially faster and cheaper than they currently do it.
Is this all great fun? Absolutely, yes, assuming those involved have taste.
Do I wish all of this was allowed and fine across basically all media and characters and styles, and for everyone to just be cool, man, so long as we don’t cross the line into non-parody commercial products? I mean, yeah, that would be ideal.
The headline says ‘unless you opt out’ but it is not obvious how you do that. There seems to be some way that rights holders can have them block particular characters, in general, but there is no clear, automatic way to do that. Otherwise, your ‘opt out’ looks like it is individually alerting them to videos. One at a time.
Jason Kint: My interpretation for you: OpenAI will now break the law by default in video, too, and make it as hard as possible to stop it. “OpenAI doesn’t plan to accept a blanket opt-out across all of an artist or studio’s work, the people familiar with the new Sora tool said.”
Ed Newton-Rex: Yup – OpenAI is trying to shift the Overton window
They are losing the public debate on training being fair use, so they are going even more extreme to try to shift what people consider normal.
Reid Southen: This is not how copyright works, it’s not how copyright has ever worked.
In what world is it okay to say, “I’m going to use this unless you tell me not to.”
THAT’S WHAT THE COPYRIGHT IS FOR.
GPT-5 Pro tries to say that opt-out, if respected, is not per se illegal, but its heart wasn’t in it. The justification for this seemed to be clearly grasping at straws and it still expects lawsuits to succeed if infringing outputs are being produced and there isn’t aggressive filtering against them. Then I pointed out that OpenAI wasn’t even going to respect blanket opt-out requests, and its legal expectations got pretty grim.
So in short, unless either I’m missing quite a lot or they’re very responsive to ‘please block this giant list of all of the characters we own’: Of course, you realize this means war.
Responses to my asking ‘how does this not mean war?’ were suggesting this was a bet on blitzkrieg, that by the time Hollywood can win a lawsuit OpenAI can render the whole thing mute, and fully pull an Uber. Or that rights holders might tolerate short-form fan creations (except that they can’t without risking their copyrights, not when it is this in everyone’s face, so they won’t, also the clips can be strung together).
Nelag: think this might be best understood as the opening bid in a negotiation, not meant to be accepted.
Imagine YouTube had spent a lot of its resources early on taking down copyrighted material, before anyone demanded it (they mostly didn’t at first). They would have presumably gotten sued anyway. Would the ultimate outcome have been as good for them? Or would courts and content owners have gone “sure, we’re obviously entitled what you were doing, as you effectively admitted by doing it, and also to a whole bunch more.”
I buy that argument for a startup like OG YouTube, but this ain’t no startup.
I don’t think that is how this works, and I would worry seriously about turning the public against OpenAI or AI in general in the process, but presumably OpenAI had some highly paid people who gamed this out?
Keach Hagey, Berber Jin and Ben Fritz (WSJ): OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, according to people familiar with the matter.
…
The opt-out process for the new version of Sora means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright material in videos the tool creates.
You don’t… actually get to put the burden there, even if the opt-out is functional?
Like, you can’t say ‘oh it’s on you to tell me not to violate your particular copyright’ and then if someone hasn’t notified you then you get to make derivative works until they tell you to stop? That is not my understanding of how copyright works?
It certainly doesn’t work the way OpenAI is saying they intend to have it work.
They also seem to have fully admitted intent.
It’s weird that they’re not even affirming that they’ll honor all character opt-outs?
OpenAI doesn’t plan to accept a blanket opt-out across all of an artist or studio’s work, the people familiar with the new Sora tool said. Instead, it sent some talent agencies a link to report violations that they or their clients discover.
“If there are folks that do not want to be part of this ecosystem, we can work with them,” Varun Shetty, VP of media partnerships at OpenAI, said of guardrails the company built into its image generation tool.
Well, what if they don’t want to be part of the ecosystem? Many creatives and IP holders do not want to be ‘worked with.’ Nor is it at all reasonable to ask rights holders to monitor for individual videos and then notify on them one by one, unless a given holder wants to go that route (and is comfortable with the legal implications of doing so on their end).
This seems like an Uber-style, ‘flagrantly violate black letter law and de double dare you to do anything about it’ style play, or perhaps a ‘this is 2025 there are no laws’ play, where they decide how they think this should work.
To be fair, there are some other ‘players in this space’ that are Going Full Uber, as in they have no restrictions whatsoever, including on public figures. They’re simply 100% breaking the law and daring you to do anything about it. Many image generators definitely do this.
For example, Runway Gen-3 doesn’t seem to block anything, and Hailuo AI actively uses copyrighted characters in their own marketing, which is presumably why they are being sued by Disney, Universal and Warner Brothers.
There are also those who clearly do attempt to block copyright proactively, such as Google’s Veo 3 which was previous SoTA, who also blocks ‘memorized content’ and offer indemnification to users.
OpenAI is at least drawing a line at all, and (again, if and only you can reliably get them to do reasonable blocking upon private request) it wouldn’t be a totally crazy way for things to work, the same way it is good that you can hail Ubers.
So, how are they going to get away with it, and what about those meddling kids? As in, they’re kind of declaring war on basically all creators of cultural content?
First, at least they’re not making that mistake with individual public figures.
While copyright characters will require an opt-out, the new product won’t generate images of recognizable public figures without their permission, people familiar with OpenAI’s thinking said.
Second, there’s the claim that training is fair use, and, okay, sure.
Disney and Comcast’s Universal sued AI company Midjourney in June for allegedly stealing their copyright work to train its AI image generator. Midjourney has responded in court filings that training on copyrighted content is fair use.
I presume that if it’s only about training data Disney and Comcast probably lose.
If it’s about some of the outputs the model is willing to give you? That’s not as clear. What isn’t fair use is outputting copyrighted material, or creating derivative works, and MidJourney seems be Going Full Uber on that front too.
It’s one thing to create art ‘in the style of’ Studio Ghibli, which seems to have been clearly very good for Studio Ghibli even if they hate it.
It’s another thing to create the actual characters straight up, whether in images or video, or to tell a rights holder it can complain when it sees videos of its characters. Individually. Video by video. And maybe we’ll take those individual videos down.
Over at OpenAI this at minimum doesn’t apply to Disney, who has clearly already successfully opted out. OpenAI isn’t that suicidal and wisely did not poke the mouse. A bunch of other major stuff is also already blocked, although a bunch of other iconic stuff isn’t.
I asked Twitter how the filters were working. For now it looks like some targets are off-limits (or at least they are attempting to stop you) and this goes beyond only Disney, but many others are fair game.
Nomads and Vagabonds: It seems to work pretty well. Blatant attempts are blocked pre-generation and more “jail break” style prompts will run but get caught in a post generation review.
Disney is the most strict but most big studio content seems to be protected, similar to GPT image generations. Smaller IP is hit and miss but still playing around with it. It is not permissive like Midjourney or Chinese models though.
If that’s approximately the most NSFW these videos can get, then that seems fine.
Indeed, I continue to be a NSFW maximalist, and would prefer that we have less restrictions on adult content of all types. There are obvious heightened deepfake risks, so presumably that would trigger aggressive protections from that angle, and you would need a special additional explicit permission to use anyone’s likeness or any copyrighted anything.
I am not a maximalist for copyright violations. I agree that up to a point it is good to ‘be cool’ about it all, and would prefer if copyright holders could cut people some slack while retaining the right to decide exactly where and when to draw the line. And I would hope that most holders when given the choice would let you have your fun up to a reasonably far point, so long as you were clearly not going commercial with it.
For Sora, even if the law ultimately doesn’t require it, even when I think permissiveness is best, I think this must be opt-in, or at bare minimum it must be easy to give a blanket opt-out and best efforts need to be made to notify all rights holders of how to do that, the same way the law requires companies to sometimes provide prominent public notices of such things.
That is not, however, the main thing I am concerned about. I worry about Act 3.
Before we get to OpenAI’s version, Meta technically announced theirs first.
Alexandr Wang (Meta): Excited to share Vibes — a new feed in the Meta AI app for short-form, AI-generated videos.
You can create from scratch, remix what you see, or just scroll through to check out videos from the creators + the visual artists we’ve been collaborating with.
For this early version, we’ve partnered with Midjourney and Black Forest Labs while we continue developing our own models behind the scenes.
As usual, no. Bad Meta. Stop it. No, I don’t care that OpenAI is doing it too.
The same as OpenAI’s Sora, Vibes combines two products.
The first product, and the one they are emphasizing and presumably plan to push on users, is the endless scroll of AI slop videos. That’s going to be a torment nexus.
Then there’s the second product, the ability to generate, remix and restyle your own AI videos, or remix and restyle the videos of others. That’s a cool product. See Act 1.
Both are going to have stiff competition from Sora.
I presume OpenAI will be offering the strictly superior product, aside from network effects, unless they impose artificial restrictions on the content and Meta doesn’t, or OpenAI flubs some of the core functionality through lack of experience.
Is short form video a moral panic? Absolutely. Large, friendly letters.
Roon: there is a moral panic around short form video content imo.
Let me amend this: I basically agree with postman on the nature of video and its corrupting influence on running a civilization well as opposed to text based media
I’m just not sure that its so much worse than being glued to your tv, and i’m definitely not sure that ai slop is worse than human slop
Chris Paxton: If this is wrong it’s because it unduly lets long form video off the hook.
Roon: an ai video feed is a worse product than a feed that includes both human made and machine content and everything in between
[post continues]
Daily Mirror, September 14, 1938:
Lauren Wilford: people often post this stuff to imply that moral panics about the technologies of the past were quaint. But the past is full of reminders that we are on a long, slow march away from embodied experience, and that we’ve lost more of it than we can even remember
the advent of recorded music and the decline of casual live performance must have been a remarkable shift, and represents both a real gain and a real loss. Singing in groups is something everyone used to do with their body. It has tangible benefits we don’t get anymore
I’ve said several times before that I think television, also known as long form video available on demand, should be the canonical example of a moral panic that turned out to be essentially correct.
Sonnet 4.5 recalls four warning about television, which matches my recollection:
Violence and aggression.
Passivity and cognitive rot.
Displacement effects.
Commercial manipulation of children.
The world continues, and the violence and aggression warnings were wrong, but (although Sonnet is more skeptical here) I think the other stuff was basically right. We saw massive displacement effects and commercial manipulation. You can argue cognitive rot didn’t happen as per things like the Flynn effect, that television watching is more active than people think and a lot of the displaced things weren’t, but I think the negative aspects were real, whether or not they came with other positive effects.
As in, the identified downsides of television (aside from violence and aggression) were right. It also had a lot of upside people weren’t appreciating. I watch a lot of television.
It seems very obvious to me that short form video that takes the form of any kind of automatic algorithmically curated feed, as opposed to individually selected short form videos and curated playlists, is a lot worse for humans (of all ages) than traditional television or other long form video.
It also seems very obvious that moving from such ‘human slop’ into AI slop would, with sufficient optimization pressure towards traditional engagement metrics, be even worse than that.
One can hope this is the worst threat we have to deal with here:
Peter Wildeford: Increasingly, every person in America will be faced with an important choice about what AI does for society.
The left is no easy shining castle either.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Short-form video is not nearly the final boss, unless I’ve missed a huge number of cases of short videos destroying previously long-lasting marriages. AI parasitism seems like the worse, more advanced, more rapidly advancing people-eater.
That’s even confining us to the individual attempting to stay sane, without considering the larger picture that includes the biggest overall dangers.
I do think short form video has very obviously destroyed a massive number of long-lasting marriages, lives and other relationships. And it has saved others. I presume the ledger is negative, but I do not know. A large fraction of the population spends on the order of hours a day on short form video and it centrally imbues their worldviews, moods and information environment. What we don’t have is a counterfactual or controlled experiment, so we can’t measure impact, similar to television.
At the limit, short form video is presumably not the ‘final form’ of such parasitic threats, because other forms relatively improve. But I’m not fully confident in this, especially if it becomes a much easier path for people to fall into combined with path dependence, we may not reach the ‘true’ final form.
Dumpster. Fire.
Check out their video (no, seriously, check it out) of what the Sora app will look like. This is their curated version that they created to make it look like a good thing.
It is a few minutes long. I couldn’t watch it all the way through. It was too painful.
At one point we see a chat interface. Other than that, the most Slopified Slop That Ever Slopped, a parody of the bad version of TikTok, except now it’s all AI and 10 seconds long. I can’t imagine this doing anything good to your brain.
OpenAI says they will operate their app in various user-friendly ways that distinguish it from existing dumpster fires. I don’t see any sign of any of that in their video.
To be fair, on the occasions when I’ve seen other people scrolling TikTok, I had versions of the same reaction, although less intense. I Am Not The Target.
The question is, is anyone else the target?
Ben Thompson, focusing as always on the business case, notes the contrast between Google creating AI video tools for YouTube, Meta creating Vibes to take you into fantastical worlds, and OpenAI creating a AI-video-only ‘social network.’
The objection here is, come on, almost no one actually creates anything.
Ben Thompson: 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 breakdown songs from KPop Demon Hunters.
While he agrees Sora 2 the video generation app is great at its job, Ben expects the novelty to wear off quickly, and questions whether AI videos are interesting to those who did not create them. I agree.
The level beyond that is whether videos are interesting if you don’t know the person who created them. Perhaps if your friend did it, and the video includes your friends, or something?
OpenAI is building a social network (like the OG Instagram) and not a content network (like TikTok).
They’re letting users generate video memes starring themselves, their friends, and their pets. And it sounds like your feed will be heavily weighted to show content from friends.
This feels like a more promising approach – you’re not competing against the other video gen players because you’re allowing people to create a new type of content.
And the videos are inherently more interesting / funny / engaging because they star people you know.
Also you guys bullied them into addressing the “infinite hyperslop machine” allegations 😂
The problem with this plan is note the ‘OG’ in front of Instagram. Or Facebook. These apps used to be about consuming content from friends. They were Social Networks. Now they’re increasingly consumer networks, where you follow influencers and celebrities and stores and brands and are mostly a consumer of content, plus a system for direct messaging and exchanging contact information.
Would I want to consume ten second AI video content created by my friends, that contains our images and those of our pets and what not?
Would we want to create such videos in the first place?
I mean, no? Why would I want to do that, either as producer or consumer, as more than a rare novelty item? Why would anyone want to do that? What’s the point?
I get OG Facebook. You share life with your friends and talk and organize events. Not the way I want to go about doing any of that, but I certainly see the appeal.
I get OG Instagram. You show yourself looking hot and going cool places and doing cool stuff and update people on how awesome you are and what’s happening with awesome you, sure. Not my cup of tea and my Instagram has 0 lifetime posts but it makes sense. I can imagine a world in which I post to Instagram ‘as intended.’
I get TikTok. I mean, it’s a toxic dystopian hellhole when used as intended and also it is Chinese spyware, but certainly I get the idea of ‘figure out exactly what videos hit your dopamine receptors and feed you those until you die.’
I get the Evil Sora vision of Bright Screen AI Slop Machine.
What I don’t get is this vision of Sora as ‘we will all make videos and send them constantly to each other.’ No, we won’t, not even if Sora the video generator is great. Not even if it starts enabling essentially unlimited length clips provided you can tell it what you want.
Evan: OPENAI IS PREPARING TO LAUNCH A SOCIAL APP FOR AI-GENERATED VIDEOS – Wired
Peter Wildeford: I applaud OpenAI here. I personally support there being a social app where all the AI-generated videos hang out with each other and leave us real humans alone.
It’s a social media site for AI videos. Not a social media site for humans. So the AI videos will choose to leave Twitter and go there instead, to hang out with their fellow kind.
I’m already laughing my head off and hooked on my Sora feed.
And now, the #1 barrier to posting (the ability to sing/dance/perform/edit) is gone. Just 100% imagination.
RIP theater kids 🪦
Hyperborean Nationalist: This is gonna go down with “clutch move of ordering us a pizza” as one of the worst tweets of all time
Jeremy Boissinot: Tell me you don’t use Tiktok without telling me you don’t use Tiktok 🤦♂️
The comments mostly disagree, often highly aggressively, hence bait.
Tracing Woods: access acquired, slop incoming.
so far half of the videos are Sam Altman, the other half are Pikachu, and the third half is yet to be determined.
That doesn’t sound social or likely to make my life better.
GFodor: an hour of Sora already re-wired my brain. my main q is if the thing turns into a dystopian hellscape or a rich new medium in 6 months. it could go either way.
one thing is for sure: half of the laughs come from the AI’s creativity, not the creativity of the humans.
Remixing like this def not possible before in any real sense. Dozens of remixes of some videos.
It’s early days.
Gabriel: I have the most liked video on sora 2 right now, i will be enjoying this short moment while it lasts.
cctv footage of sam stealing gpus at target for sora inference
Yes, I found this video modestly funny, great prompting. But this is not going to ‘help users achieve their long term goals’ or any of the other objectives above.
Joe Weisenthal: Anyone who sees this video can instantly grasp the (at least) potential for malicious use. And yet nobody with any power (either in the public or at the corporate level) has anything to say (let alone do) to address it, or even acknowledge it.
This isn’t even a criticism per se. The cat may be completely out of the bag. And it may be reality that there is literally nothing that can be done, particularly if open source models are only marginally behind.
Sam Altman, to his credit, has signed up to be the experimental deepfake target we have carte blanche to do with as we wish. That’s why half of what we see is currently Sam Altman, we don’t have alternatives.
As standalone products, while I hate Sora, Sora seems strictly superior to Vibes. Sora seems like Vibes plus a superior core video product and also better social links and functions, and better control over your feed.
I don’t think Meta’s advantage is in focusing on the 90% who consume. You can consume other people’s content either way, and once you run out of friend content, and you will do that quickly, it’s all the same.
I think what Meta is counting on is ‘lol we’re Meta,’ in three ways.
Meta is willing to Be More Evil than OpenAI, more obviously, in more ways.
Meta brings the existing social graph, user data and network effects.
Meta will be able to utilize advertising better than OpenAI can.
I would assume it is not a good idea to spend substantial time on Sora if it is used in any remotely traditional fashion. I would even more so assume that at a minimum you need to stay the hell away from Vibes.
The OpenAI approach makes sense as an attempt to bootstrap a full social network.
If this can bootstrap into a legit full social network, then OpenAI will have unlocked a gold mine of both customer data and access, and also one of dollars.
It is probably not coincidence that OpenAI’s new CEO of Product, Fijo Sima, seems to be reassembling much of her former team from Meta.
Andy Wojcicki: I’m surprised how many people miss the point of the launch, focus on just the capabilities of the model for example, or complain about AI slop. The video model is the means, not the goal.
The point is building a social platform, growing audience further, gathering more, deeper and more personal info about the users.
Especially if you compare what Zuck is doing with his 24/7 slop machine, there are several things they did right:
social spread via invites. Gives a little bit of exclusivity feel, but most importantly because of reciprocity, friends are inclined to try it etc. perceived value goes up.
not focusing on generic slop content, but personalized creation. Something I’ve been calling ‘audience of one/few’ ™️, instead of the ill conceived attempt to make a Hollywood producer out of everyone, which is a losing strategy. If you want to maximize for perceived value, you shrink the audience.
identity verification. Addressing the biggest concern of people with regard to AI content – it’s all fake bots, so you don’t engaging with the content. Here they guarantee it’s a real human behind the AI face.
so kudos @sama looks like a well thought-out roll out.
The crux is whether Nobody Wants This once the shine wears off, or if enough people indeed do want it. A social network that is actually social depends on critical mass of adoption within friend groups.
The default is that this plays out like Google+ or Clubhouse, except it happens faster.
I don’t think this appeals that much to most people, and I especially don’t think this will appeal to most women, without whom you won’t have much of a social network. Many of the things that are attractive about social networks don’t get fulfilled by AI videos. It makes sense that OpenAI employees think this is good friend bonding fun in a way that the real world won’t, and I so far have seen zero signs anyone is using Sora socially.
How does Altman defend that this will all be good, beyond the ‘putting your friends in a video is fun and a compelling away to connect’ hypothesis I’m betting against?
Sam Altman: We also feel some trepidation. Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.
It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed. The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn’t fall into that trap, and has come up with a number of promising ideas. We will experiment in the early days of the product with different approaches.
In addition to the mitigations we have already put in place (which include things like mitigations to prevent someone from misusing someone’s likeness in deepfakes, safeguards for disturbing or illegal content, periodic checks on how Sora is impacting users’ mood and wellbeing, and more) we are sure we will discover new things we need to do if Sora becomes very successful.
Okay, so they have mitigations for abuse, and checks for illegal content. Notice he doesn’t say the word ‘copyright’ there.
Periodic checks on how Sora is impacting users’ mood and wellbeing is an interesting proposal, but what does that mean? A periodic survey? Checking in with each user after [X] videos, and if so how? Historically such checks get run straight through and then get quietly removed.
Okay, so what are they planning to do?
Altman offers some principles that sound great in theory, if one actually believed there was a way to follow through with them, or that OpenAI would have the will to do so.
Ryan Lowe: a fascinating list of principles for Sora. makes me more optimistic. it’s worth commending, *IFthere is follow through (especially: “if we can’t fix it, we will discontinue it”)
at a minimum, I’d love transparency around the user satisfaction data over time.
most social media companies can’t hold to promises like this because of market forces. maybe OpenAI can resist this for a while because it’s more of a side business.
(Editor’s Note: They are currently doing, AFAICT, zero of the below four things named by Altman, and offering zero ways for us to reliably hold them accountable for them, or for them to hold themselves accountable):
To help guide us towards more of the good and less of the bad, here are some principles we have for this product:
*Optimize for long-term user satisfaction. The majority of users, looking back on the past 6 months, should feel that their life is better for using Sora that it would have been if they hadn’t. If that’s not the case, we will make significant changes (and if we can’t fix it, we would discontinue offering the service).
Let me stop you right there. Those are two different things.
Are you actually optimizing for long-term user satisfaction? How? This is not a gotcha question. You don’t have a training signal worth a damn, by the time you check back in six months the product will be radically different. How do you know what creates this long-term user satisfaction distinct from short term KPIs?
There is a long, long history of this not working for tech products. Of companies not knowing how to do it, and choosing not to do it, and telling themselves that the short term KPIs are the best way to do it. Or of doing this with an initial launch based on their intuitions and talking extensively to individual users in the style of The Lean Startup, and then that all going away pretty quickly.
Remember when Elon Musk talked about maximizing unregretted user minutes on Twitter? And then we checked back later and the word ‘unregretted’ was gone? That wasn’t even a long term objective.
The default thing that happens here is that six months later you do a survey, and then if you find out users are not doing so great you bury the results of the survey and learn to never ask those questions again, lest the answers leak and you’re brought before congress, as Zuckerberg would likely explain to you.
Even if you make ‘significant changes’ at that time, well yeah, you’re going to make changes every six months anyway.
*Encourage users to control their feed. You should be able to tell Sora what you want—do you want to see videos that will make you more relaxed, or more energized? Or only videos that fit a specific interest? Or only for a certain about of time? Eventually as our technology progresses, you will be should to the tell Sora what you want in detail in natural language.
(However, parental controls for teens include the ability to opt out of a personalized feed, and other things like turning off DMs.)
This is a deeply positive and friendly thing to do, if you actually offer a good version of it and people use it. I notice that this service is not available on any existing social network or method of consuming content. This seems deeply stupid to me. I would use Instagram (as a consumer) a nontrivial amount if I could filter via a natural language LLM prompt on a given day, and also generate permanent rules in the same fashion, especially on a per-account basis.
The obvious problem is that there are reasons this service doesn’t exist. And failing to offer this seems dumb to me, but these companies are not dumb. They have reasons.
The optimistic reason: Until recently this wasn’t technically feasible and they don’t know how to do it, and diffusion is hard, but this is OpenAI’s wheelhouse. I’d love for this to be the primary or only reason, and for natural language filtering to be coming to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube and everyone else by Mid 2026. I don’t expect that.
Companies believe that users hate complexity, hate giving feedback, hate having options even if they’re fully optional to use, and that such things drive users away or at best cause users to not bother. OpenAI lets you thumbs up or thumbs down a conversation, nothing more, which caused no end of problems. Netflix eliminated star ratings and eliminated and declined to create various other sources of explicit preferences. TikTok became the new hotness by reading your micromovements and timings and mostly ignoring all of your explicit feedback.
Companies believe that you don’t know what you want, or at least they don’t want you to have it. They push you heavily towards the For You page and endless slop. Why should we expect OpenAI to be the one friendly holdout? Their track record?
You’re telling me that OpenAI is going to be the one to let the user control their experience, even when that isn’t good for KPIs? For reals?
I. Do. Not. Believe. You.
They claim they shipped with ‘steerable ranking,’ that lets you tell it what ‘you’re in the mood for.’ Indeed, they do have a place you can say what you’re ‘in the mood’ for, and drop an anvil on the algorithm to show you animals zoomed in with a wide angle lens or what not.
I do think that’s great, it’s already more than you can do with Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
It is not, however, the droids that we are looking for on this.
Here’s how they describe the personalized Sora feed:
To personalize your Sora feed, we may consider signals like:
Your activity on Sora: This may include your posts, followed accounts, liked and commented posts, and remixed content. It may also include the general location (such as the city) from which your device accesses Sora, based on information like your IP address.
Your ChatGPT data: We may consider your ChatGPT history, but you can always turn this off in Sora’s Data Controls, within Settings.
Content engagement signals: This may include views, likes, comments, and remixes.
Author signals: This may include follower count, other posts, and past post engagement.
Safety signals: Whether or not the post is considered violative or appropriate.
That sounds a lot like what other apps do, although I am happy it doesn’t list the TikTok-style exact movements and scroll times (I’d love to see them commit to never using that).
And you know what it doesn’t include? Any dials, or any place where it stores settings or custom instructions or the other ways you’d want to give someone the ability to steer. And no way for the algorithm to outright tell you what it currently thinks you like so you can try and fix that.
Instead, you type a sentence and fire them into the void, and that only works this session? Which, again, I would kill for on Instagram, but that’s not The Thing.
This is actually one of the features I’d be most excited to test, but even in its limited state it seems it is only on iOS, and I have an Android (and thus tested on the web).
This is also the place where, if they are actually Doing The Thing they claim to want to do, it will be most clear.
That goes double if you let me specify what is and isn’t ‘appropriate’ so I can choose to be treated fully like an adult, or to never see any hint of sex or violence or cursing, or anything in between.
*Prioritize creation. We want to make it easy and rewarding for everyone to participate in the creation process; we believe people are natural-born creators, and creating is important to our satisfaction.
You’re wrong. Sorry. People are mostly not creators as it applies here, and definitely not in a generally sustainable way. People are not going to spend half their time creating once they realize they average 5 views. The novelty will wear off.
I also notice that OpenAI says they will favor items in your feed that it expects you to use to create things. Is that what most users actually want, even those who create?
*Help users achieve their long-term goals. We want to understand a user’s true goals, and help them achieve them.
If you want to be more connected to your friends, we will try to help you with that. If you want to get fit, we can show you fitness content that will motivate you. If you want to start a business, we want to help teach you the skills you need.
And if you truly just want to doom scroll and be angry, then ok, we’ll help you with that (although we want users to spend time using the app if they think it’s time well spent, we don’t want to be paternalistic about what that means to them).
With an AI video social network? What? How? Huh?
Again, I don’t believe you twice over, both that I don’t think you’d do it if you knew how to do it, if you did start out intending it I don’t think this survives contact with the enemy, and I don’t think you know how to do it.
One thing they credibly claim to be actually doing is prioritizing connection.
We want Sora to help people strengthen and form new connections, especially through fun, magical Cameo flows. Connected content will be favored over global, unconnected content.
This makes sense, although I expect there to be not that much actually connected content, as opposed to following your favorite content creators. To the extent that it does force you to see all the videos created by your so-called friends and friends of friends, I expect most users to realize why Facebook and Instagram pivoted.
On the plus side, if OpenAI are actually right and the resulting product is highly user customizable and also actively helps you ‘achieve your long term goals’ along the way, and all the other neat stuff like that, such that I think it’s a pro-human healthy product I’d want my kids and family to use?
Then this will be a case of solving an alignment problem that looked to me completely impossible to solve in practice.
Of course, to a large but not full extent, they only get one shot.
If it doesn’t go great? Then we’ll see how they react to that, as well.
This reaction is a little extreme, but extreme problems can require extreme solutions.
Deep Dish Enjoyer: if you make and post a sora video i’m blocking you – 1 strike and you’re out. similar to my grok tagging policy.
sorry but the buck stops here.
if you don’t want to see evil slop take over you have to be ruthlessly proactive about this stuff.
to be clear – i will be doing this if i see it anywhere. not just my comment sections.
Sinnformer: not sharing a damn one of them increasingly viewing sora as unsafe no, not inherently just for humans.
Rota: So as long as you don’t make it you’re safe.
Deep Dish Enjoyer: It depends.
I am going to invoke a more lenient policy, with a grace period until October 5.
If you post or share an AI video that does not provide value, whether or not you created it, and you have not already provided substantial value, that’s a block.
Sharing AI videos that are actually bangers is allowed, but watch it. Bar is high.
Sharing AI videos for the purposes of illustrating something about AI video generation capabilities is typically allowed, but again, watch it.
I believe it would be highly unwise to build an AGI or superintelligence any time soon, and that those pushing ahead to do so are being highly reckless at best, but I certainly understand why they’d want to do it and where the upside comes from.
Building The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine? In this (AI researcher) economy?
Matthew Yglesias: AI poses great peril but also incredible opportunities — for example it could cure cancer or make a bunch of videos where people break glass bridges.
Matthew Yglesias: I don’t think it should be illegal to use A.I. to generate videos. And for fundamental free-speech reasons, we can’t make it illegal to create feeds and recommendation engines for short-form videos. Part of living in a free, technologically dynamic society is that a certain number of people are going to make money churning out low-quality content. And on some level, that’s fine.
But on another, equally important level, it’s really not fine.
Ed Newton-Rex: The Sora app is the worst of social media and AI.
– short video app designed for addiction
– literally only slop, nothing else
– trained on other people’s videos without permission
This is what governments are deregulating AI for.
Veylan Solmira: It’s disturbing to me that many top-level researchers, apparently, have no problem sharing endless content the most likely outcome of which seems to be to drain humans of empathy, arouse their nervous system into constant conflict orientation, or distort their ability to perceive reality.
This technology seems to be very strongly, by default, in the ‘widespread social harm’ part of the dual use spectrum of technology, and the highest levels of capabilities researchers can only say “isn’t this neat”.
This complete disregard of the social impact of the technology they’re developing seems to bode extremely poorly to overall AI outcomes.
Sam Altman’s defense is that no, this will be the good version of all that. Uh huh.
Then there’s the question of why focus on the videos at all?
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh: Why would you be spending staff time and intellectual energy on launching this if you expected AGI within the current Presidency?
Runner Tushar: Sam Altman 2 weeks ago: “we need 7 trillion dollars and 10GW to cure cancer”
Sam Altman today: “We are launching AI slop videos marketed as personalized ads”
Sam Altman: i get the vibe here, but…
we do mostly need the capital for build AI that can do science, and for sure we are focused on AGI with almost all of our research effort.
it is also nice to show people cool new tech/products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money given all that compute need.
when we launched chatgpt there was a lot of “who needs this and where is AGI”.
reality is nuanced when it comes to optimal trajectories for a company.
The short summary of that is ‘Money, Dear Boy,’ plus competing for talent and vibes and visibility and so on. Which is all completely fair, and totally works for the video generation side of Sora. I love the video generation model. That part seems great. If people want to pay for it and turn that into a profitable business, wonderful.
Presumably most everyone was and is cool with that part.
The problem is that Sora is also being used to create a 10-second AI video scroll social network, as in The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine. Not cool, man. Not cool.
One can imagine releasing a giant slop machine might be bad for morale.
Matt Parlmer: Would not be surprised if we see a big wave of OpenAI departures in the next month or two, if you signed up to cure cancer *andyou just secured posteconomic bags in a secondary I don’t think you’d be very motivated to work on the slop machine.
GFodor: The video models are essential for RL, and I don’t think we are going to consider this content slop once it’s broadly launched.
Psychosomatica: i think you underestimate how these people will compromise their own mental models.
What happens if you realize that you’re better off without The Big Bright Screen Slop Machine?
Paul Yacoubian: Just found out if you try to delete your Sora app account you will lose your chatgpt account and be banned forever from signing up again.
Mousa: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave 😅
Maia Arson Crimew: > all your data will be removed
> you cannot reuse the same email or phone number
so not all of it, huh 🙂
Very little of it will get deleted, given they have a (stupid) court order in place preventing them from deleting anything even if they wanted to.
The more central point, in addition to this being way too easy to do by accident or for someone else to do to you, is that they punish you by nuking your ChatGPT account and by banning you from signing up again without switching phone number and email. That seems like highly toxic and evil behavior, given the known reasons one would want to get rid of a Sora account and the importance of access to ChatGPT.
Then again, even if we leave the app, will we ever really escape?
This morning, Tesla published its production and delivery numbers for the third quarter of the year. We’ve heard the same story for a while, one of diminishing sales as customers tire of a stale product lineup and are repulsed by the politics of the company’s CEO. But Q3 2025 tells a different tale. It’s been a good three months for the beleaguered automaker, one that appears to have cleared out a lot of old inventory.
Tesla built a total of 447,450 electric vehicles between July and September this year. That’s actually a 4.8 percent decrease compared to the same three months last year.
The Models 3 and Y production lines saw less of a slowdown—Tesla built 435,826 of these EVs, a 1.8 percent decline on last year. But the Models S and X, grouped together with the US-only Cybertruck, saw the greatest cutbacks. Just 11,624 of these collected models were produced, a 55.1 percent decrease compared to Q3 2024.
By contrast, Tesla managed to sell 497,099 cars during Q3 2025, a 7.4 percent increase compared to Q3 2024. The Models 3 and Y did all the heavy lifting here, increasing sales by 9.4 percent year over year to 481,166. But the near-antique Models S and X, and the divisive Cybertruck kept playing the old tune: sales of these models dropped by 30.5 percent to just 15,933 units.
That’s well above most analysts’ estimates for Q3, which predicted that the automaker would sell fewer than 450,000. The end of the IRS clean vehicle tax credit in the US is believed to be a significant contributing factor to the sales growth, although registration data from Europe has shown sales growth in France, Spain, Denmark, and Norway.
It’s quite the clear-out of inventory—more than 45,000 Models 3 and Y and more than 4,000 of Tesla’s other EVs have been cleared from Tesla’s books.
According to cyber security experts at the Tokyo-based group Nihon Cyber Defence (NCD), Japanese companies are increasingly seen as attractive targets for ransomware attackers because of their poor defenses and the fact that many companies simply paid the demanded sum through back channels.
In 2024 Japan’s National Police Agency said it had received 222 official reports of ransomware attacks—a 12 percent rise from the previous year, but experts at NCD said it represented just a small fraction of the real volume of attacks.
In a survey conducted by the agency, Japanese companies said that in 49 percent of ransomware cases, it took at least a month to recover the data lost in the attack. Asahi said in a statement that there was no confirmed leakage of customer data to external parties.
In a measure of growing public and private sector panic over cyber vulnerabilities, Japan passed a law in May that granted the government greater rights to proactively combat cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers. The chair of the government’s policy research council at the time, Itsunori Onodera, warned that without an urgent upgrade of the nation’s cyber security, “the lives of Japanese people will be put at risk.”
Asahi, whose shares fell 2.6 percent on Thursday, not only produces Super Dry beer in Japan but also soft drinks, mints, and baby food, as well as producing own brand goods for Japanese retailers.
Asahi is still investigating whether it was a ransomware attack, according to a spokesperson.
As a result of the cyber attack, Asahi has postponed the planned launch of eight new Asahi products, including fruit soda, lemon-flavored ginger ale, and protein bars, indefinitely.
On Wednesday, Asahi trialled using paper-based systems to process orders and deliveries in a small-scale trial and it is in the process of figuring out whether to proceed with more manual-style deliveries.
Operations in other regions of the world, such as Europe, where it sells Peroni Nastro Azzurro, have not been affected by the cyber attack.
Scammers have been abusing unsecured cellular routers used in industrial settings to blast SMS-based phishing messages in campaigns that have been ongoing since 2023, researchers said.
The routers, manufactured by China-based Milesight IoT Co., Ltd., are rugged Internet of Things devices that use cellular networks to connect traffic lights, electric power meters, and other sorts of remote industrial devices to central hubs. They come equipped with SIM cards that work with 3G/4G/5G cellular networks and can be controlled by text message, Python scripts, and web interfaces.
An unsophisticated, yet effective, delivery vector
Security company Sekoia on Tuesday said that an analysis of “suspicious network traces” detected in its honeypots led to the discovery of a cellular router being abused to send SMS messages with phishing URLs. As company researchers investigated further, they identified more than 18,000 such routers accessible on the Internet, with at least 572 of them allowing free access to programming interfaces to anyone who took the time to look for them. The vast majority of the routers were running firmware versions that were more than three years out of date and had known vulnerabilities.
The researchers sent requests to the unauthenticated APIs that returned the contents of the routers’ SMS inboxes and outboxes. The contents revealed a series of campaigns dating back to October 2023 for “smishing”—a common term for SMS-based phishing. The fraudulent text messages were directed at phone numbers located in an array of countries, primarily Sweden, Belgium, and Italy. The messages instructed recipients to log in to various accounts, often related to government services, to verify the person’s identity. Links in the messages sent recipients to fraudulent websites that collected their credentials.
“In the case under analysis, the smishing campaigns appear to have been conducted through the exploitation of vulnerable cellular routers—a relatively unsophisticated, yet effective, delivery vector,” Sekoia researchers Jeremy Scion and Marc N. wrote. “These devices are particularly appealing to threat actors, as they enable decentralized SMS distribution across multiple countries, complicating both detection and takedown efforts.”
Caroline Wilson Palow, legal director of the campaign group Privacy International, said the new order might be “just as big a threat to worldwide security and privacy” as the old one.
She said: “If Apple breaks end-to-end encryption for the UK, it breaks it for everyone. The resulting vulnerability can be exploited by hostile states, criminals, and other bad actors the world over.”
Apple made a complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the original demand, backed by a parallel legal challenge from Privacy International and Liberty, another campaign group. That case was due to be heard early next year, but the new order may restart the legal process.
TCNs are issued under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, which the government maintains is needed by law enforcement to investigate terrorism and child sexual abuse.
Key figures in Donald Trump’s administration, including vice-president JD Vance and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, had pressured the UK to retract the January TCN. President Donald Trump has likened the UK’s request to Chinese state surveillance.
In August, Gabbard told the Financial Times that the UK had “agreed to drop” its demand that Apple enable access to “the protected encrypted data of American citizens.”
A person close to the Trump administration said at the time that the request for Apple to break its encryption would have to be dropped altogether to be faithful to the agreement between the two countries. Any back door would weaken protections for US citizens, the person said.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last month hosted Trump for a state visit, during which the two world leaders announced that US tech companies would invest billions of dollars to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in Britain.
Members of the US delegation raised the issue of the request to Apple around the time of Trump’s visit, according to two people briefed on the matter. However, two senior British government figures said the US administration was no longer leaning on the UK government to rescind the order.
Form doesn’t always quite follow function in racing. LMP1 died because it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to compete, so the Hypercar rules are designed to keep costs relatively sane. Once your car is designed, it gets homologated, and from then on, hardware changes are mostly limited to things that improve reliability but don’t affect lap times.
Ferrari made a few small changes between the 2023 and 2024 seasons. “After Le Mans 24, now the rest of the car is exactly the same, but we involve many, many parts of the car where we can make a difference because the car is homolgated… But we work at a lot in terms of engine control, for example, in terms of setup, because we discover a lot of new [things] in our car,” Coletta told me, then pointed to his competitors’ hardware changes as evidence that Ferrari got it right from the start.
Does the P stand for pretty?
The rules also hold back the worst impulses of the aerodynamicists. The ratio of lift to drag must be 4:1, with limits on absolute values. And that has freed up the stylists to create a visual link between their brand’s sports prototype and the cars they make for road use.
The rear wing looks like it came from a superhero cartoon. (This is a compliment.) Credit: Ferrari
I’m not sure anyone has capitalized on that styling freedom better than Ferrari. Other Hypercars have a bad angle or two—even the Aston Martin Valkyrie looks a little strange head- or tail-on. Not the 499P, which dazzles, whether it’s painted Ferrari red or AF Corsa yellow. At the front, the nose calls out current road cars like the hybrid SF90 or 296. The rear is pure drama, with three vertical wing elements framing a thin strip of brake light that runs the width of the car. Behind that? Curves up top, shadowy venturis underneath.
It looks best when you see it on track and moving. As it does, it shows you different aspects of its shape, revealing curves you hadn’t quite noticed before. Later, stationary in the garage with the bodywork off for servicing, the complex jumble of electronics and machinery looks like a steampunk nightmare. To me, at least—to the mechanics and engineers in red fire suits, it’s just another day at work, with almost as many team members capturing content with cameras and sound recorders.
Runway, a video generation start-up that has deals with Hollywood studios, including Lionsgate, launched a product last month that uses world models to create gaming settings, with personalized stories and characters generated in real time.
“Traditional video methods [are a] brute-force approach to pixel generation, where you’re trying to squeeze motion in a couple of frames to create the illusion of movement, but the model actually doesn’t really know or reason about what’s going on in that scene,” said Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive officer at Runway.
Previous video-generation models had physics that were unlike the real world, he added, which general-purpose world model systems help to address.
To build these models, companies need to collect a huge amount of physical data about the world.
San Francisco-based Niantic has mapped 10 million locations, gathering information through games including Pokémon Go, which has 30 million monthly players interacting with a global map.
Niantic ran Pokémon Go for nine years and, even after the game was sold to US-based Scopely in June, its players still contribute anonymized data through scans of public landmarks to help build its world model.
“We have a running start at the problem,” said John Hanke, chief executive of Niantic Spatial, as the company is now called following the Scopely deal.
Both Niantic and Nvidia are working on filling gaps by getting their world models to generate or predict environments. Nvidia’s Omniverse platform creates and runs such simulations, assisting the $4.3 trillion tech giant’s push toward robotics and building on its long history of simulating real-world environments in video games.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has asserted that the next major growth phase for the company will come with “physical AI,” with the new models revolutionizing the field of robotics.
Some such as Meta’s LeCun have said this vision of a new generation of AI systems powering machines with human-level intelligence could take 10 years to achieve.
But the potential scope of the cutting-edge technology is extensive, according to AI experts. World models “open up the opportunity to service all of these other industries and amplify the same thing that computers did for knowledge work,” said Nvidia’s Lebaredian.
Additional reporting by Melissa Heikkilä in London and Michael Acton in San Francisco.
I love 4X games. I’ve tried other strategy game genres, but frankly, they don’t stick if they’re not first and foremost 4X games—at the heart of it, it must be about exploring, expanding, exploiting, and yes, exterminating.
I suspect that the first 4X game most people played was some entry in the Civilization franchise—though certainly, a select few played precursors dating back to text-based games in the 1970s.
But for me, the title that kicked off my obsession was Master of Orion II (MOO2)—a game that has you develop and build up planets across a simple galaxy map, researching speculative future technologies, and ultimately wiping out your opponents and claiming dominion over the known universe. (There are other victory conditions too, but that one is the most fun.)
There is something satisfying about making a couple thousand small choices that all add up to that galaxy map gradually changing color in your favor until the final cut scene plays, declaring you the true Master of Orion.
The games I love the most are the ones where you make decisions that compound over many, many hours to a long-term payoff. I’ll take that over games with bite-sized, contained challenges and short play times any day. The deeper and longer the experience, the better the payoff can be. To me, that’s ultimately what makes 4X games great. MOO2 is no exception.
I needed this validation. Credit: Samuel Axon
Nostalgic but flawed
That said, it’s not a perfect game. It benefited from the lessons it could learn from more than a decade of 4X games before it, and its designers were clearly thinking about how to make it balanced and fun.
They just missed the mark sometimes. For example, a big part of the game is choosing perks that customize your empire from before the first turn. One of those perks is called “Creative,” which allows you to learn multiple technologies at once rather than one at a time. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone consciously declining to choose that perk unless they’re looking to make things a lot harder for themselves.
The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea “demonic” and said we need to “kill it with fire before it’s too late.” The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see “the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!” Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it “incredibly disrespectful” and “in bad taste” to “ghoulish” and “so fucked up,” with very little that was more receptive to the concept.
But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. “We’re not afraid of people seeing it and we’re not afraid of criticism,” he told Ars. “I’m just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what’s been out there so far has not really been informed.”
“It’s unfortunate that a few people have really negative things to say about it, sight unseen, just the level of it being a concept,” DeMoulin continued. “It’s not perfect. I’m not sure something like this can ever be perfect. But I think what you strive to do is feed enough information into it and test it enough so that the experience it creates for the fans is one that feels genuine.”
“It’s going to have to be really good or we’re all going to say no”
This isn’t the first time LA Comic Con has featured an interactive hologram (which for the Stan Lee experience means a life-sized volumetric screen-in-a-box that can show different views from different angles). Starting in 2019, the convention used similar technology to feature Boffo the Bear, a 7-foot-tall animated blue ursid who served as the MC for a live talent show featuring famous voice acting talent. But Boffo was powered by a real-time motion-captured improv performance from actor Mark DeCarlo rather than automated artificial intelligence.
A live mo-capped version of Boffo the Bear hosts a panel with voice actors at LA Comic Con.
In the years since Boffo’s introduction at the con, DeMoulin said he’s kept up with the team behind that hologram and “saw the leaps and bounds that they were making in improving the technology, improving the interactivity.” Now, he said, it’s possible to create an AI-powered version that ingests “all of the actual comments that people made during their life” to craft an interactive hologram that “is not literally quoting the person, but everything it was saying was based on things that person actually said.”
DeMoulin said he called Bob Sabouni, who manages the Stan Lee Legacy brand, to pitch the AI Stan Lee avatar as “kind of an entry point into people asking questions about the Marvel universe, the stories, the characters he created.” Sabouni agreed to the idea, DeMoulin said, but added that “it’s gonna have to be really good or we’re all going to say no.”
With that somewhat conditional approval, DeMoulin reached out to Proto Hologram, the company that had developed the Boffo the Bear experience years earlier. Proto, in turn, reached out to Hyperreal, a company that describes itself as “powering ownership, control, performance, and monetization of identity across digital ecosystems” to help develop the AI model that would power the Lee avatar.
A promotional video from Proto Holograms shows off the kind of volumetric box that the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar will appear in.
Hyperreal CEO and Chief Architect Remington Scott tells Ars that the company “leverages a customized ecosystem of cutting-edge AI technologies” to create “bespoke” and “custom-crafted” AI versions of celebrities. To do that for Stan Lee, DeMoulin said they trained a model on decades of content he had left behind, from tapes of dozens of convention panels he had appeared on to written and spoken content gathered by the managers of the Stan Lee Universe brand.
Scott said Hyperreal “can’t share specific technical details” of the models or training techniques they use to power these recreations. But Scott added that this training project is “particularly meaningful, [because] Stan Lee had actually begun digitizing himself while he was alive, with the vision of creating a digital double so his fans could interact with him on a larger scale.”
After incurring costs of “tens of thousands into six figures” of dollars, DeMoulin said he was finally able to test the Lee hologram about a month ago. That first version still needed some tweaks to get the look and feel of Lee’s delivery just right, though.
“Stan had a considered way of speaking… he would pause, he had certain catch phrases that when he used them he would say them in a certain way,” DeMoulin said. “So it took a while to get to the hologram to be able to say all that in a way that [Sabouni] and I and others that work with Stan felt like, ‘Yeah, that’s actually starting to sound more like him.’”
“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words”
Anyone who is familiar with LLMs and their tendency to confabulate might be worried about the potential for an AI Lee avatar to go off-script or make things up in front of a live audience. And while DeMoulin said he was concerned about that going in, those concerns have faded as he and others who worked with Lee in his lifetime have spent hours throwing “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of questions at the hologram “to sort of see where the sensitivities on it are.”
“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words,” DeMoulin said. “Just because I haven’t personally seen [the model hallucinate] doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but that hasn’t been my experience.”
The living version of Stan Lee appeared at the Wizard World convention in 2018, shortly before his death.
Credit: Getty Images
The living version of Stan Lee appeared at the Wizard World convention in 2018, shortly before his death. Credit: Getty Images
While a moderator at the convention will be on hand to repeat fan questions into a microphone (to avoid ambient crowd noise from the showfloor), DeMoulin said there won’t be any human filtering on what fans are allowed to ask the Lee avatar in the 15- to 20-minute group Q&A sessions. Instead, DeMoulin said the team has set up a system of “content governors” so that, for instance, “if you ask Stan what he thought of the last presidential election he’s gonna say ‘That’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about the Marvel universe.'”
For topics that are Marvel-related, though, the AI avatar won’t shy away from controversy, DeMoulin said. If you ask the avatar about Jack Kirby, for instance, DeMoulin said it will address the “honest disagreements about characters or storylines, which are gonna happen in any creative enterprise,” while also saying that “‘I have nothing but respect for him,’ which is I think largely what Stan would have said if he was asked that question.”
Hyperreal’s Scott said the company’s approach to training digital avatars on verified content “ensures responses stay true to Stan’s documented perspectives and values.” And DeMoulin said the model is perfectly willing to say when it doesn’t know the answer to an appropriate question. In early testing, for instance, the avatar couldn’t answer a question about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, DeMoulin said, because that wasn’t part of its training data. After a subsequent update, the new model provided a relevant answer to the same question, he said.
“We are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead”
Throughout our talk, DeMoulin repeatedly stressed that their AI hologram wasn’t intended to serve as a replacement for the living version of Lee. “We want to make sure that people understand that we are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead,” he said. “We’re not trying to say that this is Stan, and we’re not trying to put words in his mouth, and this avatar is not gonna start doing commercials to advertise other people’s products.”
DeMoulin said he sees the Lee avatar as a kind of futuristic guide to a library of Marvel information and trivia, presented with a fun and familiar face. “In the introduction, the avatar will say, ‘I’m here as a result of the latest developments in technology, which allow me to be a holographic representation of Stan to answer your questions about Marvel and trivia’ and this, that, and the other thing,” DeMoulin said
Still, DeMoulin said he understands why the idea of using even a stylized version of Lee’s likeness in this manner could rub some fans the wrong way. “When a new technology comes out, it just feels wrong to them, and I respect the fact that this feels wrong to people,” he said. “I totally agree that something like this–not just for Stan but for anyone, any celebrity alive or dead–could be put into this technology and used in a way that would be exploitative and unfortunate.”
Fans like these, seen at LA Comic Con 2022, will be the final arbiters of whether the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar is respectful or not.
Credit: Getty Images
Fans like these, seen at LA Comic Con 2022, will be the final arbiters of whether the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar is respectful or not. Credit: Getty Images
That’s why DeMoulin said he and the others behind the AI-powered Lee feel a responsibility “to make sure that if we were going to do this, we never got anywhere close to that.” Moreover, he said he’s “disappointed that people would be so negative about something they’ve not seen. … It’s not that I think that their point of view is invalid. What I think is invalid is having a wildly negative point of view about something that you haven’t actually seen.”
Scott said concerns about respect for the actual human celebrity are why they “partner exclusively with authorized estates and rights holders like Stan Lee Universe.” The “premium, authenticated digital identities” created by Hyperreal’s system are “not replacing artists” but “creating respectful digital extensions that honor their legacy,” Scott said.
Once fans actually see the AI-powered Lee avatar in person, DeMoulin said he’s confident they’ll see the team behind the convention is “trying to do it in a way that will actually be delightful and very much be consistent with Stan’s legacy… We clearly have to set our sights on doing this right, and doing it right means getting people that knew and loved the guy and worked with him during his career to give us input, and then putting it in front of enough fans to know if we’re doing it in a way that lives up to his standards.”
And if he’s wrong about the expected reception? “I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans interact with [it] and they don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it,” he said. “I saw firsthand the impact that Stan had in that [convention] environment, so I think we have a team of people together that love and respect that and are trying to do something which will continue that. And if it turns out, for some reason, this isn’t that, we won’t do it.”
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
YouTube has a new Labs program, allowing listeners to “discover the next generation of YouTube.” In case you were wondering, that generation is apparently all about AI. The streaming site says Labs will offer a glimpse of the AI features it’s developing for YouTube Music, and it starts with AI “hosts” that will chime in while you’re listening to music. Yes, really.
The new AI music hosts are supposed to provide a richer listening experience, according to YouTube. As you’re listening to tunes, the AI will generate audio snippets similar to, but shorter than, the fake podcasts you can create in NotebookLM. The “Beyond the Beat” host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations.
The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify’s AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn’t create playlists like Spotify’s robot. This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google’s Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses.
Microsoft and Asus revealed the ROG Xbox Ally handheld PC gaming line in June and promised an October 16 launch date in August. But they waited all the way until Thursday night to reveal preorder pricing set at $599.99 for the base ROG Xbox Ally hardware and a whopping $999.99 for the souped-up ROG Xbox Ally X.
Those prices put the baseline ROG Xbox Ally units in the same general price tier as competition like Valve’s Steam Deck OLED, Lenovo’s Legion Go S, and even Nintendo’s Switch 2. But the higher-grade ROG Xbox Ally X is significantly more expensive than almost all competing gaming handhelds, thanks in part to components like a Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor and an NPU that Asus says will ensure it is ready for a future when “AI enhancements” are rolling out in new games.
That may seem like overkill when Steam Deck users seem content using their handheld mainly for low-end games like Vampire Survivors and Hades. But Asus said that, in pre-release hardware tests, the ROG Xbox Ally X gets “up to a 30% performance boost” over 2024’s ROG Ally X on high-end games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The newer hardware also gets “up to twice the battery life” over the ROG Ally X on a game like Hollow Knight Silksong, Asus said.
The new Xbox Ally line keeps the same 7-inch 1080p screens and starting RAM and storage capacity as the regular ROG Ally units from years past. But in addition to upgraded processors, Asus’ new handhelds also sport branded Xbox-style controls and logos and promise easy access to “all of the games available on Windows” through the new “Xbox experience for handhelds” that can handle games from various storefronts and manage launchers.
We’ll have to wait until we get our hands on our own testing units to see how that extra power and new interface compare to the competition. For now, the ROG Xbox Ally can be preordered directly from the Asus shop or retailers like Microsoft and Best Buy.
However, in its news release, NASA said it is no longer obligated to a specific number of resupply missions.
Chasing those defense dollars
In its own statement on the announcement, Sierra Space said the new approach will provide it with more “flexibility” as the company seeks to attract national defense contracts.
“Dream Chaser represents the future of versatile space transportation and mission flexibility,” said Fatih Ozmen, executive chair at Sierra Space, in the statement. “This transition provides unique capabilities to meet the needs of diverse mission profiles, including emerging and existential threats and national security priorities that align with our acceleration into the Defense Tech market.”
Although the NASA news release does not detail the space agency’s concerns about allowing Dream Chaser to approach the station, sources have told Ars the space agency has yet to certify the spacecraft’s propulsion system. The spacecraft is powered by more than two dozen small rocket engines, each capable of operating at three discrete levels of thrust for fine control or more significant orbit adjustments. Certification is a necessary precursor for allowing a vehicle to approach the orbiting laboratory.
Sierra said it is now targeting a “late 2026” debut for Dream Chaser, but that date is far enough in the future that it is likely subject to Berger’s Law, and probably means no earlier than 2027. This all but precludes a cargo mission to the International Space Station, which is scheduled to be deorbited in 2030, and presently has two more-than-capable supply vehicles with SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop’s new, larger Cygnus.
It is possible that Dream Chaser could serve a future market of commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit, but to do so, Sierra will have to get the vehicle flying reliably, frequently, and at a relatively low cost to compete with Dragon and Cygnus. Those are big hurdles for a spacecraft that is now many years behind schedule and no longer has any guaranteed government missions.
