We’ve been expecting the tsunami of AI-generated videos since we first tasted AI’s image-making capabilities several years ago. The results have been disappointing until recently. But now our social feeds are being flooded with increasingly realistic AI-created video. OpenAI, Meta and Google have come into play.
In late September, Meta introduced Vibes, an AI-only video feed, in the latest version of its Meta AI app. It allows users to share videos created with the company’s generative tools in the Meta app, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Five days later, OpenAI unveiled its Sora app, which, in addition to creating videos from a prompt, aims to allow users to insert themselves, their friends, and even public figures who allow it, into hyper-realistic scenarios.
More than any other challenger — even Google’s Veo3, which the tech giant launched this summer and quickly integrated into YouTube shorts — Sora is positioning itself as the TikTok of AI, leaning heavily on the ability for users to have a fully synthetic version of themselves appear in their content. The app quickly shot to the top of Apple’s App Store, recording 164,000 downloads within 48 hours of launch.
Sora’s playbook may be new to the tech world, but it’s familiar to Demi Guo, the 26-year-old founder of AI video company Pika, whose vision of the trajectory of social AI video foretold the current moment.
Launched in November 2023, Pika is known for its Pikaffects app, which offers users a library of viral AI video effects. These include the simply named ‘Squish It’, which turns the subject of a video or photo into a soft toy manipulated by a pair of AI-generated hands, and ‘Cake-ify It’, which slices up a subject and gives it the innards of a cake. The company is so committed to its vision of letting users immerse themselves in shareable scenarios that at the end of the summer it launched its own social video making app, Pika: AI Video & Trend Maker.
“We truly believe that AI will be the next way for people to express themselves and define the next social platform,” Guo said the day after Sora’s launch. “That’s why we launched our app two months ago.”
With a valuation of $470 million, Pika is a smaller but prophetic player in the AI video space. Guo’s next move could provide a new glimpse into the future of the rapidly changing industry.
Matan Cohen-Grumi remembers the first time he experienced “the squish.”
The founder and creative director of generative AI video platform Pika was playing with a new set of effects the company had just come up with. One tool took an image and made it appear as if two pairs of fingers were literally squishing the subject (be it a cat, a cup, or a person’s head) in a wonderfully (and terrifyingly) realistic way, complete with creaking sound effects.
“There was something very surprising about it,” says Cohen-Grumi, a former TV and commercial executive who first discovered the magic of generative AI in 2023, when he used Midjourney to make a short film for his (now defunct) rock band. “I remember saying to everyone, ‘I’ve been playing with AI for so long. I’ve never laughed so hard. I hope this will translate.'”
It did. When Pika released its Pikaffects tools in October 2024, the internet was flooded with morphing bikes, pets and body parts. Tattoo artist Christopher Miranda’s video, which appeared to show a knife cutting into a man’s tattooed head, revealing a yellow-layered cake, was viewed 1.9 million times on Instagram. Even brands got in on the action: fashion house Balenciaga posted a video of one of its 6XL sneakers being squashed, garnering nearly 20,000 likes on Instagram. Pika says the virality of the new tools translated into an 800% increase in users.
The success of Pikaffects was an “aha” moment for the company. The company was co-founded in April 2023 by Guo and Chenlin Meng, who dropped out of Stanford’s artificial intelligence PhD program to start Pika. Originally, the company was focused on being a tool for professional quality video. But now it saw an opportunity to become the go-to AI platform for the TikTok audience, focusing on social media-friendly templates for easily shareable short videos.
This approach allowed Pika to differentiate itself from the longer-form tools aimed at more professional creators from companies like Midjourney, Runway, and Luma. With its ready-made library of special effects and videos that average only about 7 seconds in length, Pika is said to go after Gen Z social media users looking to create (or at least join in) the latest viral trend.
[Photo illustration: Michelle Watt. This image includes elements generated with GPT-4.]
Pika was early in charting a path for its social media video generation tools. But the country is no longer alone, and its rivals have significantly better resources. In addition to its billion-dollar coffers, companies like Google also have access to their own social media platforms that they can use to mainstream their AI tools.
That’s exactly what Google did when it started integrating Veo 3 into YouTube Shorts in July, reaching the platform’s 2 billion monthly users. Vibes users can share via Meta Apps, and while Sora videos can be downloaded to share elsewhere, OpenAI is positioning the app as a platform that can stand alone.
How long Pika will be able to remain alone in an increasingly crowded corner of the AI industry is an open question. (There were rumors in the summer about a possible acquisition of Facebook — which Vibes appears to have shut down.) Pika’s nearly half-billion-dollar valuation isn’t on the scale of Runway, which is valued at $3 billion and expected to generate $300 million by 2025, let alone OpenAI.
With monthly subscriptions starting at $8 and going up to $76, Guo will only say that sales are in the “eight figures.” But the company has a respectable 16.4 million registered users, and the average number of monthly active users across the web and mobile apps totaled 1.4 million in the first half of 2025. However, the company says less than a quarter of a million of them are paying subscribers. As it looks to grow, Pika’s challenge will continue to spawn irresistible social-friendly effects that users can’t find anywhere else.
Following the success of Pikaffects, the company has doubled its efforts in creating templates aimed at creating short, meme-friendly videos that can be quickly shared on TikTok and Instagram without the need for any AI skills. Over the summer, Pika gave users a new thrill by allowing Labubu to create an image of the adorable furry-eared beast that was so popular with Gen Alpha.
Ben Woods, a creator economy analyst at MIDiA Research, says Pika’s approach is a smart response to the “tyranny of creative possibilities” that AI tools impose on users. Most AI video generators “give us that blank box and say, ‘Make whatever you want.’ But some consumers come to that and don’t know what to create,” he says. “There are too many options.” Pika’s templates help explore these possibilities.
Pika’s social posts are not subtle. Last May, it released a provocative branded film called Pikapocalypse. It showed a young woman using the app to blow up her cat, turn a potted flower into a balloon and turn a pile of clothes into butterflies – unaware of an apocalyptic wasteland outside her window. Guo says the purpose of the video was to highlight how, with AI platforms, “people are creating their own reality.” It caused a stir in part for playing with the idea that this alternate reality itself could be a mindless, isolated hole.
The company gained more attention in June, when Adobe integrated Pika’s tools into its generative AI app Firefly, aimed at video professionals and social creators, along with other video models including Veo 3, OpenAI’s Sora and Luma. Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe, sees Pika as a dynamic means of creating social content. “Pika offers a unique type of model with a unique personality,” he says.
One issue Pika will have to grapple with is cost. The company’s free version of Pikaffects has been criticized for being laggy — and because users can only create a limited number of videos, users often have to upgrade to a paid version, which starts at $10 per month. Meanwhile, Pika’s new Sora-like social app has a standard paid tier of $95.90 per year and an “artist” tier for $389 per year.
To get younger kids and teens interested in Pika, “it should be almost completely free to use, because you won’t see kids and teens paying those prices for videos,” says Kai Turner, a former Netflix and Sony executive who focuses on generative AI video. Cost is not an issue for Sora and Vibes, at least for the time being. Both are currently free, although ChatGPT Pro users have access to an experimental Sora 2 Pro model that is not yet in wide release.
Recognizing this challenge, Guo says Pika is “brainstorming different monetization models,” including offering certain premium features for a fee, while significantly reducing the price for basic users. At the same time, the social video creation app shows that Guo is continuing a broader vision for Pika beyond just viral tools. That puts her in more direct competition with Sora and others – which may be a tougher space to carve out a niche in.
MIDiA’s Woods says Pika’s power remains its ability to turn the endless possibilities of AI video into easy-to-use, viral features. “OpenAI is now positioning itself to compete with TikTok and YouTube, rather than being an AI creator tool app, as I still see Pika,” says Woods.
Guo notes that Sora’s launch has caused a spike in downloads of Pika’s app, though she doesn’t specify how many. And despite predicting this moment for AI video, she seems to still be figuring out her next steps. (In a conversation the day after Sora’s launch, Guo noted that the company’s user base is predominantly female — something she seems ready to do, though she didn’t detail how.)
Guo is clear about one thing: she doesn’t want her app to be associated with the “AI slop” that is invading social platforms and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. “Our app isn’t just about random videos, slop videos – it’s really about yourself, your identity,” she says, noting that Pika focuses on putting users at the center of their own creations. It’s an idea that also animates the new Sora app and its cameo-based videos.
“I think there’s a chance that Open AI might be inspired by this idea of bringing a user’s identity into their app as well,” says Guo. “It’s really valuable that a big company like OpenAI also realizes that. We’re very proud to be an underdog in the space – and the first to inspire everyone.”
A version of this article will appear in the Fall 2025 print edition of Fast Company.
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