We’ve been expecting the tsunami of AI-generated videos ever since we first got a taste of AI’s image-making abilities several years ago. The results until recently were underwhelming. But now our social feeds are awash in increasingly realistic AI-created video. OpenAI, Meta, and Google have entered the game.
At the end of September, Meta introduced Vibes, an AI-only video feed, in the newest version of its Meta AI app. It allows users to share videos created by the company’s generative tools in the Meta app, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Five days later, OpenAI unveiled its Sora app, which, beyond creating videos from a prompt, is focused on allowing users to insert themselves, their friends, and even public figures who allow it into hyperrealistic scenarios.
More than any other challenger—even Google’s Veo3, which the tech giant launched over the summer and quickly integrated into YouTube shorts—Sora is positioning itself as the TikTok of AI, leaning heavily into the ability for users to have a fully synthetic version of themselves to appear in their content. The app quickly shot to the top of Apple’s App Store, logging 164,000 downloads within 48 hours of launch.
Sora’s playbook might be new to the tech world, but it’s familiar to Demi Guo, the 26-year-old founder of the AI video company Pika, whose vision for the trajectory of social AI video predicted the current moment.
Launched in November 2023, Pika is known for its Pikaffects app, which offers users a library of viral AI video effects. They include the straightforwardly named “Squish It,” which turns the subject of a video or photo into a squishy toy manipulated by a pair of AI-generated hands, and “Cake-ify It,” which slices up a subject and gives it the innards of cake. The company is so committed to its vision of letting users insert themselves into shareable scenarios that it launched its own social video creation app, Pika: AI Video & Trend Maker, at the end of the summer.
“We really believe AI will be the next way for people to express themselves and will define the next social platform,” Guo said the day after Sora launched. “That’s the reason we launched our app two months ago.”
With a $470 million valuation, Pika is a smaller, but prophetic player in AI video. Guo’s next move could offer another glimpse at the future of the fast-moving industry.
