Late last week, Meta quietly flipped the switch on Vibes, a freshly minted AI-video feed inside its Meta AI app, a new experiment in blending generative media with social discovery. Almost in reply, OpenAI launched Sora, a standalone app that lets users create and share short AI-generated video clips, nudging the imagination: What if your social feed is no longer what people produce, but what AI dreams up for you?
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, OpenAI opened another front: Pulse, a feature in ChatGPT Pro that promises to send you a curated, proactive briefing each morning, part news, part suggestions, part assistant whispering in your ear. The signal is clear: the fight for your attention is shifting from reactive feeds to anticipatory intelligence.
Vibes: Meta’s Bet on AI-First Video Discovery
Meta’s announcement frames Vibes as a way to let “ideas become videos” and encourage playful remixing. In practice, users can scroll through clips generated by the community (or Meta’s models), tap in to remix, change visuals or music, and then post them to Vibes or cross-post to Instagram or Facebook.
The feed is personalized, the company says; over time it will lean harder on what you engage with. Vibes replaces the previous “Discover” feed in Meta AI, which had shown user prompt-history and AI responses; Vibes is more about the cinematic output than the prompt itself.
Meta seems to be banking on users wanting to play director to AI’s camera; creating, remixing, and adapting AI media rather than capturing live video themselves.
But not everyone greets the shift as progress. Critics warn that these “slop feeds” of rapidly generated, low-effort media could depress creative standards, endlessly recycling weirdness. The tension is whether this becomes a sandbox for imaginative expression or a swamp of generic noise.
Sora: OpenAI’s Foray Into Social AI Video
OpenAI’s Sora is a more audacious gambit: an AI-native video social app where all content is generated (or remixed) by AI, constrained by rules of consent and identity. In its debut, users can create up to 10-second clips, insert themselves via Cameo (with identity checks), remix others’ videos (if co-owners permit), and share within the Sora community.
Unlike a typical social network, there’s no uploading of your own camera video (at least for now), everything is AI generated or remixed. The app is currently invite-only, with availability rolling out gradually.
Behind Sora lies OpenAI’s generative video engine (Sora 2), which is described as a vertical-scroll, “For You” style feed of AI clips. The idea: don’t just ask AI for a single video; let AI generate many, surface the best ones, and let users influence the remix.
OpenAI is especially careful about identity and misuse: you cannot generate someone’s likeness unless they consent via a cameo upload; public figures are restricted. The company also embeds metadata to label that videos are AI generated, and it faces pushback from Hollywood: Disney, for instance, has already opted out of its copyrighted content being used.
The risk: does this feel like a creative playground, or like a dystopian remix factory powered by algorithms? If Meta is pressuring toward AI-assisted video, OpenAI is pushing toward AI-born video.
Pulse: Your AI Morning Briefing
While meta-feeds battle for your scroll, OpenAI’s Pulse stakes a different claim: owning your morning. Introduced as part of ChatGPT, Pulse conducts overnight “asynchronous research” on your behalf, mining your chat history, feedback, connected apps, and memory, to assemble a personalized, proactive update for when you wake. The output can include follow-ups on conversations, suggestions for dinner, or next steps on long-term goals.
Crucially, Pulse initiates engagement rather than waiting for a prompt. It nudges, nudges softly, trying to position itself as the first thing you check in the morning; before email, before news, before social media.
OpenAI stresses privacy safeguards: app integrations (email, calendar, etc.) are off by default, and users can control them. But the move is bold: OpenAI is chasing the “anchor moment” of the day. Pulse is, in effect, a silent but persistent competitor to your alarm clock and morning ritual.
In the bigger picture, Pulse grows from OpenAI’s longer-term ambition to build a “super-assistant” that is deeply personalized, always available, and able to operate across channels (web, apps, voice). Combined with agents that can perform tasks (e.g. scheduling, browsing, file operations), OpenAI appears to be stitching together the scaffolding of a wholly agentive AI presence in daily life.
The Stakes and the Tensions
These moves by Meta and OpenAI aren’t just feature updates; they’re philosophical bets about what social media and personal intelligence will look like in a generative AI era.
Attention, redefined. Social media has long been about capturing scroll time. But what if your feed anticipates rather than reacts? Vibes and Sora invert the model: instead of you feeding content, content feeds you. Pulse tries to preempt that first decision in your day.
Reality, blurred. AI-generated media raises fresh challenges of authenticity and consent. Meta and OpenAI are both trying to build guardrails, identity checks, opt-outs, consent flows, but the scale and creativity of misuse are still unknown.
Creativity vs. commodity. Will these feeds become tools for artistic expression; or a glut of synthetic noise? As media scholar critics already warn, there’s a risk of commoditizing surprise and flattening quality.
Privacy vs. proactivity. Pulse’s ambitions rest on deep personal data access. Users may like the helpfulness; but discomfort over being “researched overnight” will be a real line to navigate.
Competition for the “first moment.” Whoever becomes your morning briefing, your default feed, your first scroll: that’s not just influence, that’s primacy. The race is no longer who has the best algorithm for page views, but who can insert themselves into the earliest moments of your day.
In the end, Vibes and Sora may turn out to be experiments; interesting, provocative, but destined to evolve or fade. Pulse, though, may be the kind of quiet engine that either becomes indispensable (or creepily intrusive). In the new media age, AI isn’t just making content, it’s trying to make your day.