OpenAI’s Sora 2 is INCREDIBLE

Sora 2 is a significant technical upgrade: synced audio, beats Google’s Veo 3 on physics and realism, higher scene continuity, and support for all the pieces from anime to cinematic shots. It may possibly follow complex, multi-shot prompts without breaking continuity, keeping track of objects, momentum, and scene logic. A defining feature is “cameos,” where verified users can insert their likeness and voice into generated scenes, with strict opt-in consent, revocation rights, and cryptographic watermarking.

The companion Sora app mirrors TikTok with a vertical feed, remix tools, and social features. But unlike competitors, OpenAI has warned studios that future Sora versions may incorporate copyrighted material unless rightsholders explicitly opt out, a pointy inversion of the standard consent model and a possible legal flashpoint. The app is invite-only within the U.S. and Canada, with Android and API support coming soon.

ChatGPT also added a shopping layer. “Easy Checkout” lets U.S. users buy Etsy and shortly Shopify products directly in chat. Purchases run on the brand new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with Stripe and now being open-sourced. ACP uses encrypted, per-merchant payment tokens and step-by-step confirmations. Merchants can plug in via Stripe or token APIs, and OpenAI takes a transaction fee without touching pricing or rankings. Multi-item carts and international rollout are next.

With Sora’s TikTok-style AI feed, default copyright opt-outs, and agent-driven payments, OpenAI is facing what critics call its “infinite slop” moment. Critics argue the corporate is collapsing search, rating, and payments right into a single black box controlled by one AI vendor, raising antitrust concerns, privacy alarms over behavioral data, and claims it’s drifting away from its safety mission. Read more.

A brand new Google DeepMind paper positions its Veo 3 video model because the visual counterpart to large language models. Trained with a continuation objective on web-scale data, Veo 3 performs zero-shot across greater than 60 visual tasks, covering segmentation, detection, denoising, and super-resolution, without task-specific tuning.

The model also shows early signs of what researchers call chain-of-frames reasoning, using temporal cues across generated frames to resolve visual logic tasks like mazes and symmetry. DeepMind expects inference costs to say no similarly to LLMs, suggesting generative video could replace specialized vision models over time.

On the patron front, Google is upgrading AI Mode in Image Search with conversational querying. Somewhat than filtering by static attributes, users can describe what they need in natural language, mix prompts with reference photos, and iteratively refine results, whether searching for clothing or browsing interior design ideas. Powered by Gemini 2.5 and built on Google Lens, the system parses subtle visual context, secondary objects, and stylistic cues while surfacing shoppable links directly in Search.

Google Drive for desktop, meanwhile, is getting AI-based ransomware detection. A model trained on tens of millions of real-world samples analyzes file behavior and halts syncing if it detects mass encryption or malicious modification. The system then alerts users via email and desktop notification and offers rollback to wash versions. The tool is entering open beta now, with general availability expected by yr’s end. Read more.

Anthropic just dropped Claude Sonnet 4.5, and it’s clearly gunning for GPT-5, not with flashy demos, but with stamina and tooling. The model can stay locked onto a coding job for greater than 30 hours without derailing, which is a giant jump from even its own Opus 4.1. Benchmarks back it up: 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified, 50% on Terminal-bench, and a jump from 42.2% to 61.4% on OSWorld in only 4 months. That shows it isn’t just spitting out code, it might actually operate inside real computing environments.

Pricing hasn’t budged ($3 per million input tokens, $15 per output), though GPT-5 is as much as seven times cheaper. Anthropic’s betting that enterprises pays for reliability, especially because it still holds 42% of the code-gen market and a $5B run rate, though most of that leans on Cursor and GitHub Copilot.

Anthropic also added checkpoints for pausing long tasks, a VS Code extension, higher terminal controls, context editing, and a memory tool to scale back context blowouts. Security is tightened under ASL-3, with higher guards against prompt injection and sensitive misuse. To check what’s next, Anthropic also launched a five-day preview called “Imagine with Claude” for Max users. It strips out prewritten functions entirely, Claude has to generate software logic from zero, in real time.

The corporate claims Sonnet 4.5 can be scoring higher in math, finance, cybersecurity, and domain reasoning. With GPT-5 pushing on price and scale, Anthropic is pitching endurance, autonomy, and developer fit as its differentiators. Read more.

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