OpenAI’s Sora 2 started off scorching hot. Things have slowed down since.
The app racked up 1 million downloads in its first five days, despite being iOS-only and requiring an invite. But for all of December, it was downloaded just over 3 million times between iOS and Android.
OpenAI’s stand-alone app for the AI video generator Sora 2 launched on iOS in late September. Despite initially requiring an invite to sign up, it was an instant success, reaching No. 1 overall on the iOS App Store’s charts after just four days. A day later, it cracked 1 million total downloads, which was faster than ChatGPT.
There was a feeding frenzy for invite codes, a testament to the hype OpenAI has been able to build in just the three years since it launched ChatGPT. Sora was launched with even greater ambitions — which is a problem for OpenAI, because demand for the app has slowed.
The logic behind Sora was fairly sound. Back in May, Meta launched an experimental AI content feed, which was, at the time, dubbed a “creepy” and “nightmarish” slop feed of AI garbage. But the philosophy behind it was pretty clear: AI content is meant to replace the user-generated content we see on our feeds every day.
This is already happening on platforms like YouTube, where we found earlier this year that four of the summer’s top 10 channels with the most subscribers consisted entirely of AI-generated videos, most of them being YouTube Shorts. TikTok-style short-form vertical videos seemed like a natural place for OpenAI to enter the content game.
Other platforms, like Instagram, have bet big on overhauling their apps to function more like TikTok, so much so that Instagram Reels are now the primary type of posts all Instagram users see. But Sora wasn’t just meant to be OpenAI’s competitor to TikTok; it was designed to interface seamlessly with all these other TikTok-like feeds.
Users could easily turn videos generated by Sora into Reels, Shorts, TikToks, Snaps, and more. Each repost would be free publicity for Sora, even if the views and engagement went to its rivals. OpenAI seemed to think it could generate the same AI content wave for video that it had unleashed for text and images. The Sora app itself doesn’t publicize any engagement totals, though, so those cross-platform reposts are the main tool we have for tracking the actual popularity of videos made on the app.
And those numbers were stratospheric — at least to begin with.
Accounts like @bestsoravids on Instagram and Epic Rankz on YouTube have recorded millions of views, likes, and comments on their Sora reposts. But all of their most successful posts happened in the week or two after the app’s launch, at the height of its visibility. In the first half of December, for example, only 20 videos with #sora or #sora2 in the hashtags received 1 million views or more on YouTube. Other popular Sora reposting accounts, like the previously mentioned @bestsoravids, stopped uploading videos entirely after a few weeks.
The other metric we have for measuring the health of Sora is downloads of the app itself. Those have fallen off.
Remember, it took Sora just five days to get to 1 million total downloads, despite being invitation-only and iOS-only. Since that initial blitz, the iOS app was downloaded just over 5 million more times over the next roughly three months, according to data from Appfigures.
The iOS version launched on the last day of September, and it was downloaded nearly 2.7 million times through the end of October. In November, the monthly total was 1.9 million, and in December it was 1.5 million. (The Android version became available in early November. It was downloaded 1.4 million times in November and 1.7 million times in December.)
For comparison, in December, TikTok was downloaded over 18 million times around the world, and YouTube was downloaded 5 million times despite having been an app for nearly two decades, literally available on iOS 1. It’s even more notable when you look at downloads in the US, specifically, which is by far Sora’s biggest market.
After Sora was made available on Android on November 4, its daily download numbers were behind TikTok within a week.
It’s possible, though, that Sora wasn’t a social media play at all, but rather a shrewd bit of advertising to entice a partner for something greater than the title of “the next TikTok.”
OpenAI and Disney announced in December that they were partnering on a deal to let Sora users have exclusive access to Disney AI inside the video-generating app. But this, too, will backfire almost immediately unless serious safeguards are put in place. As Futurism has reported, users were already generating Pixar versions of 9/11, Jeffrey Epstein, and George Floyd’s death before the partnership was announced. They’re surely primed to find ways to misuse Disney IP once it’s added officially to the app.
This is the real pattern we continually see over and over with AI products like Sora: a massive wave of curiosity, a tremendous drop-off as normal people get bored, and a remaining user base of obsessed power users and trolls. Only this time, Disney has been duped into offering up its entire creative catalog to the denizens still left on the app.
Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. We’ll be sharing some of our findings here on Sherwood News. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.
