• Everyday AI
  • Posts
  • Ep 623: Sora 2: AI TikTok Brain Rot or Your Company’s Secret Creative Weapon?

Ep 623: Sora 2: AI TikTok Brain Rot or Your Company’s Secret Creative Weapon?

Inside Sora 2, OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation, Perplexity releases agentic browser to all, Microsoft takes on ChatGPT with new offering and more.

Author

Everyday AI
October 02, 2025

Sup y’all! 👋

Don’t sleep on today’s Sora 2 episode. You may not think Sora is for you, but OpenAI kinda missed the business unlock.

We go over it today.

Oh, and if you want access to Sora, we're giving away codes today and tomorrow.

To enter tomorrow’s drawing, go repost today’s show on LinkedIn then and check tomorrow’s newsletter.

(Today’s winner at the end of today’s newsletter.)

✌️

Jordan

(Let’s connect on LinkedIn. Just tell me you’re from the newsletter otherwise stranger danger!)

Outsmart The Future

Today in Everyday AI
8 minute read

🎙 Daily Podcast Episode: Sora 2 is about more than social media and AI brain rot. But yeah, there’s that, too. Give it a watch/read/listen.

🕵️‍♂️ Fresh Finds: Nano Banana updates, two new U.S. bills that could regulate AI, Thinking Machines finally releases product and more. Read on for Fresh Finds.

🗞 Byte Sized Daily AI News: OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation, Perplexity releases agentic browser to all, Microsoft takes on ChatGPT with new offering and more.  Read on for Byte Sized News.

💪 Leverage AI: OpenAI buried the lede with its Sora 2 rollout. Skip past the viral social media aspect and you’ll see a biz powerhouse. We dish.  Keep reading for that!

↩️ Don’t miss out: Did you miss our last newsletter? We covered Gemini AI tips for Google Sheets, Meta using AI chats for Facebook ad targeting, Sora 2 copyright talks heating up, Trump doubling down on AI video usage and more. Check it here!

Ep 623: Sora 2: AI TikTok Brain Rot or Your Company’s Secret Creative Weapon?

Everyone's talking about Sora 2. 🗣️

- How good it is
- How it's going after TikTok as a social media app
- The downsides of cyclical AI brain rot

But, you're missing the big upside.

On today's show, we're going to tell you how businesses should be focusing on the untapped potential of Sora 2.

Also on the pod today:

• Sora 2's hyper-realistic physics 🤸
• Watermark dodging: too easy? 🪟
• Cameo feature: control your likeness 🧑‍💻

It’ll be worth your 45 minutes:

Listen on our site:

Click to listen

Subscribe and listen on your favorite podcast platform

Listen on:

Here’s our favorite AI finds from across the web:

New AI Tool Spotlight – Instruct is an AI workforce with one prompt, Caesr lets you automate on any device with AI, Merge lets you connect enterprise-ready tools with AI agents.

AI Acquisitions — Acquisitions for AI companies are about to go bonkers. Here’s why.

Thinking Machines — Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Thinking Machines launches Tinker for cheap open-model fine-tuning. 

Nano Banana — Google’s viral Nano Banana, AKA 2.5 Flash Image, rolled out some updates:

AI Regulation — Two newly introduced U.S. bills could impose sweeping liability and pre-deployment testing on AI—critics warn it’s a major brake on U.S. AI progress. Curious how “nationalization” and $1M/day fines fit in?

Perplexity News — Visual Electric is joining Perplexity and shutting down in 90 days. What will Perplexity’s new Agent Experiences team do with VE’s design chops?

LLM Updates — Claude is rolling out a limited demo to its ‘Imagine with Claude’ feature to Pro users, which allows you to create AI interfaces on the fly. Try it here. 

 

1.OpenAI’s $500B Valuation Locked In With $6.6B Employee Share Sale 🤑

OpenAI has closed a $6.6 billion secondary sale at a $500 billion valuation, letting eligible current and former employees cash out while the company stays private.

Only about two-thirds of the authorized $10.3 billion was sold, which insiders see as confidence in OpenAI’s long-term prospects as it surpasses SpaceX’s latest private valuation. The deal comes amid an aggressive talent war, with Meta dangling nine-figure offers, and underscores how secondary sales are becoming the go-to reward and retention tool for elite AI shops.

2. Perplexity launches free AI browser Comet ☄️

Perplexity has rolled out Comet for free, bundling an AI assistant into every new tab to help with research, scheduling, and shopping, with paid tiers adding an email assistant and background automation.

The company is also building a mobile app and is partnering with CNN, Condé Nast, Fortune, and The Washington Post under its Comet Plus program, a move that signals a legal risk-aware strategy as it uses web content to power answers without permission. Comet Plus costs $5 a month on its own and is included with Perplexity Pro and Max, hinting at a broader push to anchor users inside an AI-first browsing experience.

3. Microsoft 365 Premium takes on ChatGPT Plus at $19.99 🥊

Microsoft has launched Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 per month, bundling desktop Office apps with Copilot and new Researcher and Analyst agents, directly challenging ChatGPT Plus at the same price.

Researcher will soon live inside Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to pull and summarize web and file data, while Analyst in Excel turns raw inputs into practical insights, hinting at a more hands-on AI workflow for everyday documents and spreadsheets.

The plan includes higher GPT-4o image and voice limits, access to Deep Research, Vision, and Actions, early trials of Office Agent and Agent Mode, plus 1 TB cloud storage and Defender, which could make it a compelling all-in-one suite for professionals growing their careers or businesses.

4. Anthropic taps new CTO amid infrastructure crunch 🏗️

Anthropic has named former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as chief technical officer, with co-founder Sam McCandlish shifting to chief architect and both reporting to President Daniela Amodei.

The company is reshaping its core technical org to tightly link product engineering with infrastructure and inference, a timely move as Anthropic contends with heavy demand from Claude and rate limits introduced this summer. With Meta and OpenAI pouring hundreds of billions into compute, Patil’s enterprise-grade infrastructure chops signal a push to optimize speed and power efficiency while scaling pre-training and large model work.

5. Study: AI Jobs Scare Inches Forward, But Not Yet Here 📰

A new study from the Yale Budget Lab says the U.S. labor market has stayed steady since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut, despite loud warnings of job losses. Researchers found no economy-wide disruption or drop in demand for cognitive work, suggesting current anxieties are ahead of the data.

That matters right now because it implies workers and companies can keep adopting AI without expecting immediate mass displacement. According to the study, meaningful effects tend to unfold over decades, so the real career impact may be slower and more strategic than headline-grabbing, giving time to upskill and experiment.

🦾How You Can Leverage:

Everyone is obsessing over copyright violations and TikTok-style brain rot, completely missing the actual unlock.

Sora 2's shiny Cameo feature accidentally created the world's best AI avatar technology. One quick phone verification gets you (or your Hr Director, or your VP or your CEO) an AI video avatar that understands physics, lighting, and environmental interaction better than any dedicated avatar company.

But yeah, let’s keep focusing on the Sora 2 brain rot of putting Sam Altman’s head in a toilet?

Nah. We’re moving past that shorties.

Here’s what you need to know about Sora 2.

1 – iOS App Signals Major Strategic Pivot 🚀

This Sora 2 rollout represents a fundamental shift for OpenAI.

Not through ChatGPT. Not on the web first. Sora 2 launched as an invite-only iOS app with TikTok-style vertical feeds, which tells you everything about where OpenAI is headed.

They built a standalone social platform that permanently connects to your ChatGPT credentials.

Delete Sora later and it (reportedly) deletes your ChatGPT account too. You cannot separate them right now, which seems like either terrible UX or brilliant lock-in strategy.

This is OpenAI's first major deployment of their single sign-in strategy, essentially creating their version of how Google credentials unlock a thousand services. The app hit number five on iOS charts within forty-eight hours.

It will almost certainly hit number one as invite codes circulate.

Current limits sit around 50 daily generations, which someone calculated would cost hundreds of dollars daily per user on Google's Veo 3 pricing.

(So we’ll see how long these generous limits keep up.)

But TBH, the feed is pure brain rot central.

Swipeable vertical videos. An AI algorithmic recommending what AI video to create next. Sam Altman's head in toilets and copyrighted characters flooding every screen dominated the first 48 hours.

Cool story. Not what your company needs. Move past the Gen Z distraction.

Try This: 

Download the iOS app only for verification and access. Get your credentials, then immediately switch to sora.com on desktop where you can focus on actual business utility instead of watching AI-generated nonsense for three hours.

2 – Physics and Soundscapes Destroy Previous Models ⚡

We generated three consecutive backflips with realistic stumbles between attempts. Gymnastics used to be AI video's nightmare, the benchmark everyone said would prove video AGI had arrived.

Sora 2 nails it consistently.

Diving board splashes land at correct angles with perfect ripple timing. Skateboarding renders with early 2000s fisheye lens aesthetics. The falls look completely authentic.

But the soundscapes separate Sora 2 from everything else.

Wind over voices. Lecture hall echoes. Footsteps changing based on surfaces. Complete audio environments generated in one pass that feel cinematically produced.

Google's Veo 3 was the best model six weeks ago. Sora 2 exceeds it significantly.

Two features unlock business utility. Cameo lets your executives insert their actual likeness and voice into any scene through ninety-second verification: say three random numbers, turn your head, done.

Remix lets you fork and edit videos by modifying text prompts.

Try This: 

Test physics limitations with scenarios relevant to your actual work. Understanding these boundaries now saves you from wasting time on impossible generations when your CFO asks for something unrealistic next week.

3 – Ignore Social, Use Desktop for Business 🔥

The iOS app is built to be a brainrot distraction. No matter what OpenAI says.

That’s all social media.

The actual unlock sits at sora.com combined with Cameo avatars. Your CEO records talking head content once, then appears anywhere saying anything without touching a camera again.

Executive teleportation at scale. Unlimited camera crews. Hours of expensive video editors…..

Gone.

Your sales director explains features once, then you generate eleven regional variations in environments specific to each market. Your VP of training delivers identical content across twelve offices so employees see familiar spaces with their actual leader present.

Traditional video production demands permits, travel, equipment, crew scheduling, and weeks in post-production.

Sora requires one iPhone verification and ten seconds of processing.

Set Cameos to private, share with specific team members, or make public. You receive notifications when someone uses your likeness with instant revocation access.

Companies figuring this out now build content advantages while competitors debate whether AI video counts as authentic. Wrong question entirely.

Try This: 

Identify your three biggest video production bottlenecks right now. Have your key leaders create Cameos this week, then prototype solutions at sora.com that previously demanded five-figure budgets and six-week timelines.

 🎁 Sora Invite Code Giveaway 🎁

Right now, Sora 2 is free but invite only. We’re giving away a few codes this week.

Richard M is today’s winner.

Richard, hit us with a reply to this email and we’ll send your Sora code.

Want to enter tomorrows Sora invite code drawing? Make sure to repost today’s LinkedIn post and look in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Reply

or to participate.