Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption

People love Sora in no small part because it lets them make videos with their favorite public figure/fictional character in them.

OpenAI knew that, played fast and loose with IP laws because… they wanted that bit of popularity to impress investors or something… then the lawyers got nervous and now they’re dialing it back down.

It’s a trick they can pull once but that’s it.

I suspect the more limited it inevitably becomes due to lawyers being lawyers, the more its popularity will wane.

Ironically enough, that’s why I think open-source models will still come out ahead in the long term. People really want to make videos with Pikachu in them.

IMO, Ben Thomson has great takes but this one is too over-indexed on the current SORA hype. Sure, a lot of people are downloading it and actively using it for creating videos/memes, but just like the Studio Ghibli phenomenon, interest will die down in a month or two.

"AI Bicycles" is a little ironic for the bike parts manufacturer Shimano, whose Sora model of derailleur has been around for years.

Ben’s original take about 1% of users being creators might end up being right eventually

Consider the Studio Ghibli phenomenon. It was fun to create and share photos of your loved ones in Ghibli aesthetics until that novelty wore off

Video models arguably have a lot more novelty to juice. But they will eventually get boring once you have explored the usually finite latent space of interesting content

Business idea: disrupt all these apps by creating an agent that watches all the brainrot for us so we all get our stolen attentions back.

For a moment I thought this article would be about AI autopiloting bicycles, so the user only needs to tread the pedals (an idea I once had, and hence why I followed the link).

China will release a video model that has no copyright guardrails and they will eat Sora's lunch.

Was excited to see Ben Thompson get on the pelicans-on-bicycles bandwagon, but alas, not quite the AI bicycles he was talking about.

I spend way too much time on short videos on Instagram and TikTok. I've got Sora and I've tried a bunch of times and I'm just baffled by its success so far.

First of all I almost never use these video services with the sound on. I know I'm not the only one, because many services have captions on by default. Sora doesn't seem to have a solution for this yet.

Second, I have almost no desire to see videos with @Sama cameos. I get served a bunch of them every time. Along with MLK, Lincoln, Kennedy etc. @Sama isn't funny to me, and raping the likenesses of some of those figures doesn't really work for me.

Third, there's not enough creativity and range in the videos. I see way too many of the same videos over and over and over. The riffs on the 1980s/90s TV commercial with the kid opening the sucky Christmas present. Ok, maybe there's a small iota of humor once or twice, but not enough to sustain endless remixes of the same thing.

I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me.

This might be controversial, but I genuinely love AI-generated “video slop”. Hear me out for a second: I’m utterly exhausted by influencers peddling their endless “buy this crap” content. Honestly, the AI slop often feels more creative, less salesy and refreshingly free of performative perfection.

But Meta knows AI slop poses a problem for their business model. When anyone can churn out engaging content without needing perfect lighting, a six-figure ad deal, or even a face or voice, there’s little incentive for users to stay locked into the influencer-driven attention economy that fuels Meta’s ad revenue. They don’t just want your attention, they want it monetized. And right now, AI slop is too democratic to profit from.