So Sora 2 has been out for about five days now and the thing I did not expect to be writing about is not the AI video itself but the invite codes. OpenAI dropped the app last Tuesday, invite-only, iOS, US and Canada only, and within about 48 hours it was sitting at number one on the App Store ahead of ChatGPT itself. Fine, impressive, whatever, the tech press has that covered six ways from Sunday already. What I actually want to talk about is watching people I know try to get in.
A friend of mine spent Thursday night in a Discord server where invite codes were being traded like Wu-Tang tickets. Some people were giving them away for free because they had four to spare and no one to give them to. Other channels had codes going for actual money, five bucks here, twenty there, one guy claiming he sold his for forty on eBay before eBay presumably pulled the listing. I don't know if that's true. I do know screenshots of it were everywhere on my timeline, which tells you something about how manufactured scarcity works even when the product behind it is, underneath all of it, a video generator.
I got in on Wednesday through a code a coworker didn't need. My honest reaction: the "Cameos" feature, where you scan your face and voice once and then can be inserted into anyone's generated clip, is genuinely unsettling in a way that feels different from every other AI demo I've poked at this year. Not because the video quality is flawless (its not, there's still a waxy quality to skin and hair does weird things in motion) but because the verification step makes it feel more real than it is. You did a little liveness check, so your brain files the output as "confirmed real person," even though what comes out the other end is a puppet.
I'm not going to pretend I have some tidy take on whether this is good or bad for the internet. Ive seen enough "AI slop" arguments this year to last a decade. What Ill say is that the invite-code economy around it is a much better story than the app itself, and its one that barely made it into the actual coverage because "influencer's cousin sold a Discord invite for a Chipotle burrito" doesn't headline well next to "OpenAI's next big thing." Somebody should be writing the oral history of these gray markets. Clubhouse had it. Gmail had it back in 2004 when an invite was basically currency at my university. BeReal had a milder version. It always plays out the same: a company creates artificial friction, and within a week a parallel economy exists to route around that friction, and the company mostly just lets it happen because the scarcity is doing marketing work for free.
On a completely different note, I've also been messing with Claude Sonnet 4.5 since Anthropic put it out last Monday, mostly for a small script that scrapes and reformats my own blog's RSS feed into a weekly digest I email myself. It handled a gnarly regex edge case on the first try that GPT-4 class models used to choke on constantly, so that was a nice surprise on an otherwise slow week. I ended up wiring the digest script to run as a cron job and pushing the actual send through the email API over at Tricknowtech, since I already host this blog's VPS there and didn't feel like standing up a separate mail service just to email myself a Tuesday morning summary. Small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that used to eat an entire evening and now takes maybe twenty minutes including the coffee break.
Anyway. If you got a Sora invite and haven't used it yet, my advice is lower your expectations for the video quality and raise them for how weird it feels the first time you watch yourself say something you never said. That part lands. The rest is still just a very good tech demo wearing a social app's clothes, and I suspect in six months we'll be talking about it the way we talk about Vine now, fondly, a little confused about why it mattered so much for one specific October.