This App Will Be Bigger Than TikTok
This is bananas!
I can’t use Sora yet. It’s only live in the US and Canada.
But over the past few days, I’ve watched enough clips to see what’s coming and it’s wild.
Not because the tech is magic (it’s not).
But because it might be the first AI product that feels social instead of smart.
The first video that stopped me scrolling
I saw a short clip of someone walking through a rainy street, talking casually to the camera. The reflections on the pavement looked real. The person’s face, the way the jacket moved … all believable.
It wasn’t filmed. It was generated from text.
Then I noticed something else: every comment was someone tagging a friend saying, “Make one of you doing this.”
That’s when it clicked … Sora isn’t just an AI video tool. It’s an interaction machine.
From “tools” to “toys”
Most AI products are built for utility … they help you write, code, summarise, automate.
Useful, sure, but soulless.
Sora is different. It’s designed for play.
It’s closer to TikTok than ChatGPT. You don’t go there to get something done. You go to see what happens.
That’s a shift that matters.
AI so far has been single-player: you prompt, it outputs.
Sora looks like the first multi-player experience.
You can include people you know, remix their clips, or make versions of shared jokes. It’s not about creating, it’s about participating.
That’s the ingredient that made TikTok take off … not the algorithm, but the feeling that everyone’s in on the same bit.
Watching from the sidelines
Being in Australia, I can’t try it yet.
But it’s interesting to see what people are doing when the tech is still limited.
They’re not pushing for realism. They’re testing boundaries.
“How far can I push this prompt?”
“Can I make a scene that feels slightly wrong?”
“Can I make something that looks like my memory of an event, not the event itself?”
It’s playful in a way AI hasn’t been in a long time.
That’s what scares me (and excites me). Once it lands here, everyone’s going to flood their feeds with clips. Not because they want views, but because it’s frictionless fun.
The hidden shift
If you zoom out, Sora isn’t about deepfakes or content creation. It’s about attention.
TikTok owns short-form human attention.
Sora could own synthetic attention … infinite, personalised, self-referential media.
That’s not a claim that it’ll kill TikTok overnight. But the pattern is familiar:
Lower barrier to creation.
Built-in remix culture.
Algorithmic distribution that rewards experimentation.
The more people use it, the better it gets.
And the better it gets, the more we’ll start trusting synthetic media as normal.
My take
This isn’t “the next big thing.” It’s the next inevitable thing.
AI tools started as productivity software.
Now they’re becoming culture engines.
And when the culture moves, the money follows.
For now, I’m happy to sit back and watch the chaos unfold from here in Melbourne.
But I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say: once this rolls out globally, every creator, brand, and even meme account will have to rethink what “video” means.
Because when everyone can generate reality on demand, the only thing left that’s real … is taste.
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- Jagger