OpenAI is continuing its inexorable crawl across the internet as we know it.

Earlier this month, SFGATE reported on the ChatGPT-maker’s intention to challenge LinkedIn, with a new jobs site and skills-certification system. On Monday and Tuesday, the San Francisco company took aim at another batch of tech giants: Google and Amazon, with the release of a new online shopping feature, and Meta and TikTok, with a new short-form video app.

OpenAI’s back-to-back announcements continue a trend, as CEO Sam Altman’s artificial intelligence company makes pages of tech news all on its own. The company’s pedal is to the floor: ChatGPT recently hit 700 million weekly users, the company is planning an utterly massive infrastructure buildout for its AI tools, and Altman has even set his sights, albeit vaguely, on the device business.

Monday’s release was, of the two fresh additions, far subtler. OpenAI is adding an option to ChatGPT’s product recommendations that will let users buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers without leaving the chatbot interface — and other brand-name merchants will be added soon, the company’s blog post said. The feature is reminiscent of Google, where a regular search for “cheap water bottles” pops up a range of purchase options, and of Amazon’s “buy now” button. OpenAI’s blog post said items’ sellers will pay small fees for each completed purchase.

If a shopping integration felt inevitable and milquetoast for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s second release of the workweek is a far riskier bet.

On Tuesday, the company revealed the newest version of its generative AI video model called Sora, capable of taking a written prompt and churning out a quasi-realistic video clip. OpenAI is launching its second app, for the occasion. Also dubbed Sora, it will feature an algorithmically recommended feed of short clips — like TikTok, but every video made with AI.

Meta’s announcement of a similar video feed called Vibes was met with widespread disdain last week; it appears that OpenAI has gone out of the way to set itself apart. The feed, it wrote in its blog post, will be ranked to “favor creativity,” be easily personalizable and prioritize videos from people a user knows.

Still, it’s a short-form video app that will make it easier than ever to fudge reality. An OpenAI employee who works on Sora bragged on X that as of Tuesday afternoon, they had the most liked video on the app: an authentic-looking video clip of Altman attempting to rob a Target. It also gives more fodder to litigious media companies, as the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI is requiring copyright holders to individually opt out of having their work appear on the app, rather than opt in.

Altman, in his personal blog post about the app’s launch, hyped up Sora as a potential boost to “the quality of art and entertainment” and enthused about the ability to put people you know into the videos.

But, the CEO wrote, “We also feel some trepidation.” He pointed to the app’s potential addictiveness and said his team can imagine the ways it could be used for bullying or end up as a “[reinforcement learning]-optimized slop feed.” Altman framed the app as a work in experimental progress, pointing to the tweaks that will ideally make the feed more personal. One of the core principles, he wrote, is to “optimize for long-term user satisfaction.”

“The majority of users, looking back on the past 6 months, should feel that their life is better for using Sora that it would have been if they hadn’t,” Altman wrote. “If that’s not the case, we will make significant changes (and if we can’t fix it, we would discontinue offering the service).”

So if the Sora app is horrible, Altman is committed to deleting it.

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/openai-takes-on-google-meta-21076572.php