Tech
Sora 2, Vibes, Feed: How much AI video do we need?
Never mind the debate over whether OpenAI's GPT-5 release is disappointing, or whether it can revitalize the failing world of AI Agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has already moved on — to releasing Sora 2, the next generation of its text-to-video engine. And to Sora by OpenAI, a new iPhone app that shot to #1 in the App Store Wednesday. Not too shabby, especially considering access to the Sora app is still invite only.
"Explore, play, and share your imagination in a community built for experimentation," the App Store description for Sora by OpenAI says. Essentially, OpenAI is about to enter the social media business the same way Facebook did — with a velvet rope around the service, and a cutting-edge feed within. OpenAI also highlighted how easy it is to insert yourself, your friends, and, well, deepfakes of just about anyone you want (including Altman, it turns out) in Sora's shortform videos.
But OpenAI is a little late to the social AI video feed app game. Since Character.AI launched Feed, which it called "the world's first AI-native social feed" in August, AI makers have begun what you might call the new pivot to video. Meta's Vibes arrived on the Meta AI app in September: Like Feed, like Sora, it's an endless scroll of shortform videos, under 10 seconds, from a creator community. (Midjourney has a similar AI video web feed, though no Midjourney smartphone app has dropped yet.)
In all cases you're invited to remix these videos and add your own. You're not invited to ask how sustainable these endless-scroll services are, given the still untold amounts of energy that every AI video creation eats.
Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand put a spin on Feed worthy of Altman's brightest predictions: "The boundary between creator and consumer is disappearing," he wrote. Come for a traditional social media "lean-back experience," stay to create a "new epic adventure," Anand added. "Doomscrolling is dead. We're ushering in the future of AI-powered entertainment."
That's one way of putting it. Another is to say these companies are competing to build the most popular "infinite slop machine," to use one description of Meta Vibes. It isn't enough that social media services like Facebook are filled with AI-generated art of dubious quality; now we're about to be inundated with so much AI video slop they'll need apps of their own to contain the flow.
Which is the one AI video feed to rule them all?
Oceans of AI slop, ironically, could help our real-world oceans to rise. Video feeds like Feed, Sora, Vibes, and Midjourney require more than their fair share of data center usage — and for many data centers around the world, that means burning carbon in one form or another. That's why once-green tech giants like Google and Microsoft are quietly walking back their commitments to renewable energy.
Are we doomed to a different kind of doomscrolling, then? One where multiple endless-scroll feeds are lighting up our brains and stroking our egos by sticking virtual versions of us in them?
There is hope, however, that we're simply going through the part of the tech product cycle known as the Cambrian Explosion.
The original Cambrian Explosion, half a billion years ago, was a relatively tiny million-year chunk of evolutionary time. During that period, most of the major forms of life on Earth that we know today emerged — in large part because they had eyes to see. It was followed by an extinction event — a crash in the levels of atmospheric oxygen that ended many species.
Likewise, we've seen this movie before in the tech world, where one product sucks all the oxygen out of the room.
There was a Cambrian Explosion of personal computer operating systems in the early 1980s. Microsoft Windows won in the early 1990s. Apple's MacOS barely survived, even though it was widely judged to be better-designed software. Users simply wanted what everyone else was using. (Even now, MacOS barely has a 15 percent market share; Apple got where it is now by dominating the smartphone market instead.)
The proliferation of search engines in the 1990s — remember Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves? — very quickly gave way to Google standing alone in the 2000s. Why? Because users simply wanted the search engine with the best secret sauce, which turned out to be PageRank.
We've also seen this movie in the social media world itself. Friendster and MySpace were part of the Cambrian Explosion of the 2000s; when the smoke cleared in 2010, Facebook was on top. The network effect kicked in. You were on Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook.
It's way too soon to judge which AI video feed will win the coming war, and not just because barely anyone can use the Sora app yet. OpenAI, Character.AI, Meta, or Midjourney are all taking slightly different approaches to video presentation and remixing, with different LLMs underpinning them.
The one with the better technology may not be the same one that wins all the users. You can have the best AI video in the world on Sora, for example, but if the world is flocking to Vibes, no one's going to see it.
But tech history — not to mention the financial cost of data center usage, which is why OpenAI has burned through more than $250 million in operating costs this year already — tells us this Cambrian Explosion won't last long. Collectively, eventually, users will choose one Infinite Slop Machine to rule them all.
And for the sake of the planet, and our survival on it, we'd better choose sooner rather than later.
Tesla is having a very tough year. Sales are down, the brand has been tarnished in the eyes of some customers by its CEO Elon Musk, tax credit incentives that brought in consumers have now expired — what else can go wrong?
How about two major program managers leaving the company in a single day?
On Monday, two Tesla executives who headed up major product initiatives separately announced that they were leaving the company: One who leads the Cybertruck program and one who leads the Model Y program.
Siddhant Awasthi, head of Tesla's Cybertruck program, announced on LinkedIn early Monday morning that he was departing the company. Awasthi's story is inspiring, as he first joined Tesla eight years ago and worked his way up the company ladder to finally head up Musk's vision for an EV truck.
"I recently made one of the hardest decisions of my life to leave Tesla after an incredible run," the now-former Cybertruck chief wrote on LinkedIn. "Eight years ago, when I started as an intern, I never dreamed I’d one day have the opportunity to lead the Cybertruck program and bring it to reality."
It's unclear why Awasthi has left the company and, based on his post, it does appear to be on good terms.
However, Cybertruck has certainly not lived up to Tesla's expectations. As The Verge notes, a recent Cybertruck recall notice from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that only 63,619 Cybertrucks have been sold since the vehicle's launch in 2023. Musk once bet that the future of Tesla depended on the company selling 250,000 Cybertruck vehicles per year. Tesla is nowhere close to doing that. In fact, interest in the Cybertruck has waned since the company claimed that it received 250,000 pre-order deposits in 2019.
Awasthi was later joined in his departure from the company by Emmanuel Lamacchia, the head of Tesla's Model Y program.
"After 8 incredible years, I'm moving on from Tesla," Lamacchia wrote on LinkedIn. "What a journey it's been… from leading NPI for Model 3 and Model Y variants to becoming the Vehicle Program Manager for Model Y, the best-selling car in the world!"
Lamacchia, who was the Model Y chief for the past four years, did lead the team behind Tesla's most successful vehicle. So, again, it does not appear any of these departures were performance-based.
If anything, it is concerning that Tesla is losing two talented leaders at the tail end of what has been a tumultuous year for the company. Pair these departures with Tesla's sales numbers and the recent news that Tesla is now looking to roll out a rental car service for Tesla vehicles, and it looks like Tesla could be in for a very bumpy 2026 as well.
You'd be forgiven if you didn't know that acclaimed octogenarian author Joyce Carol Oates — author of Them and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been — is a prolific, excellent poster. Yes, as in someone who posts online. But she is, and has long been.
Billionaire Elon Musk recently discovered this fact on X, his very own platform. And now he's beefing with Oates, or at least trying to prove he is definitely Not Mad. So…what happened? Let me explain.
Why is Elon Musk mad at author Joyce Carol Oates?
In short, Oates surgically owned Musk on X. She quote-tweeted a post about Musk and wondered what joy or meaning he derived from life.
She wrote:
"So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the 'most wealthy person in the world.'"
It was a devastating read on the world's richest man. It quickly went very viral. Musk didn't love it. He posted about it because Musk posts constantly. He called it "demonstrably false." He said, "Oates is a liar and delights in being mean. Not a good human." He claimed, "Eating a bag of sawdust would be vastly more enjoyable than reading the laboriously pretentious drivel of Oates."
You know what they say about which dogs holler and why.
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What's the latest with the Musk vs. Oates beef?
To be clear, of course, there have been instances of Musk saying he enjoyed things in culture. Journalist Ronan Farrow this year spoke about how Musk appreciates — and often greatly misreads — science fiction.
But if you parse through Musk's timeline, you do see a picture of someone who mostly posts to boost his companies, air grievances, and shitpost about political stuff. It'd be super weird to see him posting about Monday Night Football or Taylor Swift's new album. (Though, he did post about Swift's private jet and offered to father a child for her. So…yeah.)
But since the Oates debacle, Musk seemed hell-bent on proving he likes stuff, which is kind of funny in and of itself. He's been replying to posts about movies, just saying things like "good movie." People have been joking about Oates, 87, getting to Musk, especially on left-leaning Bluesky.
For the uninitiated, Oates has long been a True Poster. There are articles about it. She's even put her foot in her mouth multiple times, a sign of someone who simply cannot help posting online. (Speaking of, please don't search "Joyce Carol Oates' foot" — she once tweeted a truly gross, super viral picture of her foot overtaken by poison ivy. Again, a True Poster.)
Since the original post, Oates has intermittently posted about Musk, while also discussing literature and cats. "Truly, it was out of curiosity: why a person with unlimited resources exhibits so little appreciation or even awareness of the things that most people value as giving meaning to life," Oates wrote.
So, it's actually not that weird that an Oates vs. Musk beef popped up this week. But it is great entertainment.
SAVE $126: A like-new Amazon Kindle Scribe (64GB) is on sale at Amazon for $278.99, down from the normal price of $404.99. That's a 31% discount and the lowest we've ever seen at Amazon.
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The darkness has arrived. When we pushed the clocks back, sunset moved up by an hour and that means it's completely dark by 5 p.m. for much of the U.S. If that leaves you feeling ready for bed by 6 p.m., you've probably considered cozying up on the couch with a good book. If you're one to take notes while reading this month's book club pick, there's a certain Kindle with features you'll like and it's on sale today.
As of Nov. 10, a like-new Kindle Scribe (64GB) is on sale for $278.99 at Amazon, marked down from the usual price of $404.99. That works out to a 31% discount that takes a nice $126 off the norm. It's also the lowest we've ever seen at Amazon. The current model of the Kindle Scribe with 64GB of storage is listed at $449.99 which means today's refurbished deal saves $171.
Kindles are some of the best e-readers on the market and buying a refurbished model is a great way to dive into e-books on a discount. On Mashable's list of the best Kindles, the 2024 version of the Kindle Scribe earns the top spot as the best model for taking notes. That applies for both students, professionals, and casual readers. Students can take advantage of note-taking in the margins of class-assigned books and even textbooks. Book-club members will be able to mark favorite sections and important passages for discussion.
The Kindle Scribe comes with a Premium Pen for all your note-taking desires. You can also access PDFs and documents on the Kindle Scribe, as well as books, so you'll be in great shape for marking up any text.
Before the holiday rush, snag a like-new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite for the lowest price ever
Amazon equipped the Scribe with an anti-glare display that measures 10.2 inches. Its thin dimensions and lightweight nature makes this a travel-friendly device that'll be great for taking to campus, to a work meeting, or on upcoming holiday travel.
While it's sitting at an all-time low price, snag a refurbished 64GB Kindle Scribe that's in like-new condition. Amazon offers the same warranty on this model as it does on new Scribes. They also upgrade software and test the battery, giving you extra reassurance when buying a pre-loved model.
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