OpenAI's Sora app is real but you'll need an invite to try it (www.engadget.com)

OpenAI has quietly launched Sora, a new iOS-only social video app powered by its Sora 2 video-generation model. The app — revealed a day after a Wired scoop — lets users generate short videos and even insert their own likeness via a feature called "Cameo." Access is currently invite-only: OpenAI controls rollout by issuing invites and allows each new user to invite up to four friends. No Android timeline or broader availability has been announced. For the AI/ML community this is a notable push of generative video technology into a mainstream, social context. Sora 2’s presence in a consumer app highlights progress in multimodal generative models that can produce personalized video content and integrate user-provided identity data. That raises technical and policy questions about safety, provenance and spoofing — e.g., robustness of detection, watermarking, consent workflows, and moderation at scale. The invite-limited launch suggests a staged testing approach, giving researchers and engineers a real-world sandbox to evaluate both model quality and operational challenges like latency, compute cost, and content controls as synthetic video becomes easier to create.