Meta Challenges Sora With Standalone Vibes App

Meta is considering making its artificial intelligence-powered short-form video feed Vibes a standalone app, TechCrunch reported Thursday (Feb. 5).

The company is testing an app and positioning it as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s Sora app, according to the report.

Meta told TechCrunch that the use of Vibes within Meta AI has been growing steadily and that the company aims to build on that momentum by making it a standalone app.

“We’ve seen that users are increasingly leaning into the format to create, discover and share AI-generated video with friends,” the company said in the report. “This standalone app provides a dedicated home for that experience, offering people a more focused and immersive environment. We will look to expand the app further based on what we learn from the community.”

Meta introduced Vibes in September as an AI-powered short-form video feed inside the Meta AI app and on meta.ai.

The tool enables users to generate clips from prompts, remix existing videos by altering visuals or music, or rework their own content. The resulting videos can be posted to Vibes or cross-shared to the Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook Stories or Reels.

“We’re working on even more powerful creation tools and models with a number of talented visual artists and creators and will be rolling these out more widely in the future,” Meta said when announcing the feature.

A month later, during an October earnings call, Meta reported that Vibes’ retention looked good and that the use of the AI creation feature was growing week over week. At that time, people had generated more than 20 billion images with Meta’s tools, and media creation in the Meta AI app has risen more than 10x after the launch of Vibes.

OpenAI launched its Sora app in September, saying the app allows users to create videos, remix generations, discover videos in a customizable feed and drop themselves into a Sora scene after capturing their likeness in a video-and-audio recording for the “characters” feature.

“We think a social app built around this ‘characters’ feature is the best way to experience the magic of Sora 2,” OpenAI said when announcing the Sora app.