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  • Issue #153: OpenAI Launches Sora 2 Social Network

Issue #153: OpenAI Launches Sora 2 Social Network

PLUS: Anthropic's Sonnet 4.5 dominates coding, OpenAI hits $500B, and robot UFC debuts

Author

Nathan Lands
October 03, 2025

Good morning, welcome to this week’s Lore Brief, your 3-minute brief of the most important moves in AI and tech.

This issue is brought to you by Factory, the fastest way to ship software with autonomous engineering agents.

Ben Tossel is giving 40M credits to all new users. With full access to the best new, agentic models like Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 Codex, I highly recommend you try it. Get the free credits here.

  • OpenAI launches Sora 2 - a next level AI video model AND a social network → Delivers cinematic-quality, physics-aware video with synced dialogue and sound. And introduces a new consumer platform where everyone can share and remix videos featuring them - the Cameo feature - friends and other users. Read more here →

  • Sora 2 Pro is rolling out in the web version → The higher-fidelity Pro model now supports both 10- and 15-second clips, with options for standard or high resolution directly in the browser. See more here →

  • Anthropic presents SOTA coding model Sonnet 4.5 → Sets a new bar in coding, reasoning, and long-horizon agent tasks, with an Agent SDK for developers. Read more here →

Framer, one of the top AI cartoon-making experts on X, just posted this super easy tutorial on generating multi-scene cartoons with Sora 2.

Impressive, how simple it is - the technique works for any video style, cartoons or photorealistic.

REK, the “UFC of Robots,” had its first fight in San Francisco. The line to watch was huge. Predicting this is going to be huge one day.

Sora App by OpenAI.

The tool of the week is definitely the Sora app by OpenAI, powered by their new AI video model Sora 2. Think TikTok-style social network, but where videos are AI-generated. It includes a Cameos feature that lets you put yourself or friends into videos (with their approval, of course).

To learn more, watch this breakdown from Matthew Berman:

Hot Takes on Sora 2:

Watch The Next Wave Podcast

  • Gemini 2.5 Flash Image now in production → Google’s image-generation & editing model is now stable, available via the Gemini API, and adds support for 10 aspect ratios, image-only outputs, consistent character rendering, and multimodal blending. Read more here →

  • OpenAI hits $500B valuation → After a $6.6B secondary share sale, OpenAI’s valuation has reached $500B, making it the most valuable private startup in the world - overtaking SpaceX and solidifying AI as the core bet of this decade. Read more here →

  • Thinking Machines launches “Tinker” API → Mira Murati’s new startup debuts its first product: Tinker, a fine-tuning API that lets developers customize LLMs with low-level primitives while the platform handles scaling and infrastructure. Read more here →

  • “Buy it in ChatGPT” goes live → OpenAI debuts Instant Checkout via its Agentic Commerce Protocol, letting users purchase directly in chat (starting with U.S. users and Etsy merchants) - a new step in agentic e-commerce. Read more here →

  • AI actress Tilly Norwood enters talent circuits → The “virtual star” drew attention at the Zurich Summit as agents sign her for campaigns - raising fresh questions about rights, identity, and monetization for AI personas. Read more here →

  • Elon Musk teases “GrokiPedia” for xAI → Musk says xAI is building a Wikipedia-like knowledge system, designed to surpass Wikipedia and move toward the broader goal of understanding the universe. Read more here →

That’s it for this week’s Lore Brief.

See you next week!