That hasn’t stopped it from soaring to the top spot on Apple’s US App Store. After I downloaded the app, I quickly learned what types of videos are, at least currently, performing well: bodycam-style footage of police pulling over pets or various trademarked characters, including SpongeBob and Scooby Doo; deepfake memes of Martin Luther King Jr. talking about Xbox; and endless variations of Jesus Christ navigating our modern world. Just as quickly, I had a bunch of questions about what’s coming next for Sora. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Can it last? OpenAI is betting that a sizable number of people will want to spend time on an app in which you can suspend your concerns about whether what you’re looking at is fake and indulge in a stream of raw AI. One reviewer put it this way: “It’s comforting because you know that everything you’re scrolling through isn’t real, where other platforms you sometimes have to guess if it’s real or fake. Here, there is no guessing, it’s all AI, all the time." This may sound like hell to some. But judging by Sora’s popularity, lots of people want it. So what’s drawing these people in? There are two explanations. One is that Sora is a flash-in-the-pan gimmick, with people lining up to gawk at what cutting-edge AI can create now (in my experience, this is interesting for about five minutes). The second, which OpenAI is betting on, is that we’re witnessing a genuine shift in what type of content can draw eyeballs, and that users will stay with Sora because it allows a level of fantastical creativity not possible in any other app. There are a few decisions down the pike that may shape how many people stick around: how OpenAI decides to implement ads, what limits it sets for copyrighted content (see below), and what algorithms it cooks up to decide who sees what. Can OpenAI afford it? OpenAI is not profitable, but that’s not particularly strange given how Silicon Valley operates. What is peculiar, though, is that the company is investing in a platform for generating video, which is the most energy-intensive (and therefore expensive) form of AI we have. The energy it takes dwarfs the amount required to create images or answer text questions via ChatGPT. This isn’t news to OpenAI, which has joined a half-trillion-dollar project to build data centers and new power plants. But Sora—which currently allows you to generate AI videos, for free, without limits—raises the stakes: How much will it cost the company?