OpenAI’s Sora AI-Video App Is Now No. 1 on Apple’s App Store. Meta Stock Drops.

Sora OpenAI text to video generative AI model is proving popular with users. (Dreamstime)

It’s official. OpenAI’s new AI-video social media app called Sora is a mega hit.

On Friday, Sora became the No. 1 downloaded app on Apple’s App Store.

The app was released on Tuesday and is a near carbon copy of TikTok but exclusively features user-generated AI videos. With a simple text prompt, users can create 10-second videos with accurate real-world physics and fully synchronized dialogue, singing, and sound effects.

Upon opening Sora, users record themselves saying a few numbers and turning their head left and right. The app can then create videos using the user’s likeness.

With permission, that likeness can then be used by friends in their own videos. These type of social features—including the ability to remix other posted videos—have been a key driver of the app’s viral growth.

“Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post Tuesday about Sora. “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.”

OpenAI has made the app invite-only to manage growth with each new user receiving a handful of invites to share with friends, which makes the app’s climb in the App Store even more impressive. Anyone can download Sora, but users need an invite code from a current user to use the app.

“We see the potential for [Sora app’s] rapid adoption, and beyond advertising, another mechanism for the [OpenAI] company to acquire unique customer data,” JPMorgan analyst Brenda Duverce wrote on Thursday.

Investors are digesting the implications of Sora potentially taking share of the attention economy in the social media space from Meta Platform’s Instagram and Bytedance’s TikTok.

Last week, Meta introduced its own concept of user-generated AI short videos in a feed called Vibes inside its Meta AI app. Vibes content tends to be more simplistic than Sora videos. The Meta AI app is currently ranked 90th in the Apple App Store.

In early trading Friday, Meta shares fell 1.2% to $718.19 amid a rising market for the major indexes.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com