We’ve been anticipating the tsunami of AI-generated movies ever since we first obtained a style of AI’s image-making talents a number of years in the past. The outcomes till lately have been underwhelming. However now our social feeds are awash in more and more life like AI-created video. OpenAI, Meta, and Google have entered the sport.
On the finish of September, Meta launched Vibes, an AI-only video feed, within the latest model of its Meta AI app. It permits customers to share movies created by the corporate’s generative instruments within the Meta app, in addition to on Fb and Instagram. 5 days later, OpenAI unveiled its Sora app, which, past creating movies from a immediate, is targeted on permitting customers to insert themselves, their associates, and even public figures who permit it into hyperrealistic eventualities.
Greater than some other challenger—even Google’s Veo3, which the tech large launched over the summer season and shortly built-in into YouTube shorts—Sora is positioning itself because the TikTok of AI, leaning closely into the power for customers to have a completely artificial model of themselves to look of their content material. The app shortly shot to the highest of Apple’s App Retailer, logging 164,000 downloads inside 48 hours of launch.
Sora’s playbook is likely to be new to the tech world, but it surely’s acquainted to Demi Guo, the 26-year-old founding father of the AI video firm Pika, whose imaginative and prescient for the trajectory of social AI video predicted the present second.
Launched in November 2023, Pika is thought for its Pikaffects app, which gives customers a library of viral AI video results. They embody the straightforwardly named “Squish It,” which turns the topic of a video or picture right into a squishy toy manipulated by a pair of AI-generated fingers, and “Cake-ify It,” which slices up a topic and provides it the innards of cake. The corporate is so dedicated to its imaginative and prescient of letting customers insert themselves into shareable eventualities that it launched its personal social video creation app, Pika: AI Video & Pattern Maker, on the finish of the summer season.
“We actually imagine AI would be the subsequent method for folks to precise themselves and can outline the following social platform,” Guo mentioned the day after Sora launched. “That’s the explanation we launched our app two months in the past.”
With a $470 million valuation, Pika is a smaller, however prophetic participant in AI video. Guo’s subsequent transfer may supply one other glimpse at the way forward for the fast-moving business.
Matan Cohen-Grumi remembers the primary time he skilled “the squish.”
The founding artistic director of the generative AI video platform Pika was taking part in round with a brand new suite of results the corporate had simply provide you with. One instrument took a picture and made it appear like two units of fingers have been actually squishing the topic—be it a cat, a cup, or an individual’s head—in a delightfully (and terrifyingly) life like method, full with scrunching sound results.
“There was one thing very shocking about it,” says Cohen-Grumi, a former TV and industrial director who first found the magic of generative AI in 2023, when he used Midjourney to make a brief movie for his (now defunct) rock band. “I bear in mind saying to everybody, ‘I’ve been taking part in with AI for thus lengthy. I’ve by no means laughed so onerous. I hope this can translate.’”
It did. When Pika launched its Pikaffects instruments in October 2024, the web was flooded with metamorphosing bicycles, pets, and physique elements. Tattoo artist Christopher Miranda’s video of what seemed to be a knife slicing into a person’s tattooed head, revealing a yellow layer cake inside, acquired 1.9 million views on Instagram. Even manufacturers obtained in on the enjoyable: Style home Balenciaga posted a video squishing certainly one of its 6XL sneakers, racking up almost 20,000 likes on Instagram. Pika says the virality of the brand new instruments translated into an 800% improve in customers.
The success of Pikaffects was an “aha” second for the corporate. Cofounded in April 2023 by Guo and Chenlin Meng, who dropped out of Stanford’s synthetic intelligence PhD program to begin Pika, the corporate was initially centered on being a instrument for professional-quality video. However now it noticed a possibility to turn out to be the go-to AI platform for the TikTok crowd centered on social-media-friendly templates for simply shareable brief movies.
This method allowed Pika to differentiate itself from the longer-form instruments, geared toward extra skilled creators, from firms like Midjourney, Runway, and Luma. With its ready-made library of particular results and movies that common solely about 7 seconds, Pika would go after Gen Z social media customers seeking to create—or at the least be a part of—the most recent viral pattern.
[Photo illustration: Michelle Watt. This image includes elements generated with GPT-4.]
Pika was early to chart a path for its video-generating instruments on social media. However it’s now not alone—and its rivals are considerably higher resourced. Past billion-dollar coffers, firms like Google even have entry to their very own social media platforms that they’ll use to mainstream their AI instruments.
Google did simply that when it started integrating Veo 3 into YouTube Shorts in July, reaching the platform’s 2 billion month-to-month customers. Vibes customers can share throughout Meta apps, and whereas Sora movies will be downloaded to share elsewhere, OpenAI is positioning the app as a platform that may stand alone.
How lengthy Pika will be capable of stand alone in an more and more crowded nook of the AI business is an open query. (There have been rumors over the summer season of a attainable Fb acquisition—which Vibes appears to have put to relaxation.) Pika’s almost half-billion-dollar valuation shouldn’t be on the size of Runway, which is valued at $3 billion and is predicted to generate $300 million in 2025, not to mention OpenAI.
With month-to-month subscriptions that begin at $8 and go as much as $76, Guo will say solely that income is within the “eight figures.” However the firm has a good 16.4 million registered customers, and common month-to-month energetic customers throughout the net and cell apps totaled 1.4 million within the first half of 2025. Nevertheless, the corporate says fewer than 1 / 4 million of them are paying subscribers. Because it appears to be like to develop, Pika’s problem can be persevering with to spawn irresistible social-friendly results that customers can’t discover elsewhere.
Following the success of Pikaffects, the corporate has doubled down on creating templates geared to creating brief, meme-friendly movies that may be shortly shared on TikTok and Instagram with out requiring any AI abilities. Over the summer season, Pika gave customers a brand new thrill by providing the power to Labubu-fy a picture into the lovely furry-eared beast that has been all the craze with Gen Alpha.
Ben Woods, a creator-economy analyst with MIDiA Analysis, says Pika’s method is a great response to the “tyranny of artistic prospects” that AI instruments impose on customers. Most AI video turbines “give us that clean field and say ‘Create no matter you need.’ However some shoppers come to that and don’t know what to create,” he says. “There’s an excessive amount of risk.” Pika’s templates assist winnow these prospects.
Pika’s social-first messaging isn’t refined. Final Might it launched a provocative model movie dubbed Pikapocalypse. It featured a younger girl utilizing the app to inflate her cat, flip a potted flower right into a balloon, and remodel a pile of garments into butterflies—oblivious to an apocalyptic wasteland outdoors her window. Guo says the purpose of the video was to underscore how, with AI platforms, “folks create their very own actuality.” It generated buzz partly for toying with the concept that this alternate actuality can itself be a senseless, self-insulated gap.
The corporate garnered extra consideration in June, when Adobe built-in Pika’s instruments into its generative AI app Firefly—focused at video professionals and social creators—together with different video fashions, together with Veo 3, OpenAI’s Sora, and Luma. Alexandru Costin, vp of generative AI at Adobe, sees Pika as a dynamic means of making social content material. “Pika gives a novel kind of mannequin with a novel persona,” he says.
One problem that Pika should wrestle with is value. The corporate’s free model of Pikaffects has been criticized for being laggy—and since it permits customers to make solely a restricted variety of movies, customers usually discover themselves needing to improve to a paid model, which begins at $10 monthly. In the meantime, Pika’s new Sora-like social app has an ordinary paid tier for $95.90 per yr and an “artist” tier for $389 yearly.
For youthful youngsters and teenagers to be concerned about Pika, “it might virtually should be fully free to make use of since you’re not going to see youngsters and teenagers paying these costs for movies,” mentioned Kai Turner, a former Netflix and Sony govt who focuses on generative AI video. Price is, at the least for now, not an element with Sora and Vibes. Each are at the moment free, although ChatGPT Professional customers have entry to an experimental Sora 2 Professional mannequin that isn’t in huge launch.
Guo acknowledges this problem, saying that Pika is “brainstorming completely different monetization fashions,” together with providing sure premium options for a value whereas tremendously reducing the worth for primary customers. On the identical time, the social video creation app exhibits that Guo is pushing forward with a wider imaginative and prescient for Pika than simply viral instruments. That places her in additional direct competitors with Sora and others—which is likely to be a more durable area during which to carve out a distinct segment.
MIDiA’s Woods says Pika’s power stays its capacity to cull the limitless prospects of AI video into easy-to-use, viral-ready options. “OpenAI now could be positioning itself to compete with TikTok and Youtube, versus being an AI creator instrument app, which continues to be what I see Pika as,” Woods says.
Guo notes that Sora’s launch introduced a spike in downloads of Pika’s app, although she doesn’t specify what number of. And regardless of her having predicted this second for AI video, she nonetheless appears to be determining her subsequent strikes. (In a dialog the day after Sora’s launch, Guo famous that the corporate’s consumer base skews feminine—one thing she appears able to lean into, although she didn’t element how.)
One factor Guo is evident about: She doesn’t need her app related to the “AI slop” that’s invading social platforms and blurring the traces between truth and fiction. “Our app is not only about random movies, slop movies—it’s actually about your self, your identification,” she says, noting that Pika focuses on letting customers heart themselves in their very own creations. It’s an concept that additionally animates the brand new Sora app and its cameo-based movies.
“I believe there’s an opportunity that Open AI was doubtlessly impressed by this concept to deliver a consumer’s identification inside their app as nicely,” Guo says. “It’s very validating {that a} large firm like OpenAI additionally realizes that. We’re actually proud to be an underdog within the area—and the primary to encourage everybody.”
A model of this text seems within the Fall 2025 print version of Quick Firm.
