Welcome back to our weekly roundup of happenings from XR and AI realms. Let’s dive in…
The Lede
Sora Soars to #1 in the App Store. You, or your favorite celebrity, can star in a 10-second video. For free. Yes, it’s free generative video tomfoolery, mostly AI slop, and so far people seem to be lapping it up. Cheap, funny, wanna-be memes are all over TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. It has an uncanny ability to put words in celebrities’ mouths. Both Robin Williams and George Carlin’s family members publicly objected to the use of their voices and likenesses in this way. While acknowledging these concerns, CEO Sam Altman defended the app on free speech grounds. Despite being invite-only, the Sora app had 627,000 downloads compared to ChatGPT’s 606,000 in its first week. It reached number one on the US App Store by its third day. Google is planning a GenAI app as well.
Feeling Spatial
Meta wants its metaverse everywhere. It’s no secret the company wants to emulate Roblox’s incredible success. Meta’s metaverse VP Vishal Shah explains how the company wants to expand Horizon Worlds beyond VR and into its social media.
Resolution: A Cinephonic Rhapsody for the Soul premiered at SXSW 2025 as a 360° dome theater experience based on Salvage Enterprise, the ambitious album by The Polyphonic Spree. Ryan Hartsell produced the project, in collaboration with director Scott Berman and band founder Tim DeLaughter. Hartsell handled both technical direction and animation workflows. The showcase sold out every day, drew long lines, and won the XR Spotlight Audience Award, becoming one of the most sought-after experiences at the festival. The dome itself was built in partnership with Fulldome.pro to screen the 43-minute immersive film.
Follow the Money
Nvidia Invests $2 Billion in Grok. Grok Commits To Buy Nvidia Chips. The chipmaker is said to be taking an equity stake while xAI simultaneously spends billions buying Nvidia’s GPUs to power its AI infrastructure. The circular flow of capital in/ revenue out inflates both companies’ valuations. The pattern recalls the vendor-financed deals of the dot-com era, when firms booked revenue by investing in their own customers. Nvidia has a similar deal with OpenAI.
The AI Desk
Elon Musk’s xAI plans to launch Grokipedia, a Wikipedia competitor to counter alleged editorial bias in the incumbent platform. I guess those pesky human moderators cannot be trusted. Musk and other critics claim they are liberal and biased, presumably because they are volunteers. Grokipedia will be built on xAI’s Grok large language model; it will auto-correct errors, rewrite articles with context, and be neutral, open-source, and freely accessible. Because Wikipedia is not all those things? Also, since Wikipedia is a not-for-profit, Musk doesn’t have the option of buying it.
Music Labels Follow Publishers and Make a Deal With AI. Universal Music Group and Warner Music are nearing deals with tech platforms and AI firms, including Google, Spotify, Udio, and Suno, to license their catalogs for AI use, The Verge reports. Labels are pushing for a model similar to sampling, where AI systems would pay micropayments per use of songs in training or generation.
WIRED profiled Neural Viz, a self-made sci-fi universe created by a lone filmmaker named Josh Kerrigan. Using tools like Midjourney, Runway, FLUX Kontext, and ElevenLabs, Kerrigan elevates AI slop to AI art.
Spatial Audio
For more spatial commentary & insights, check out the AI/XR Podcast, hosted by the author of this column, Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and futurist for Paramount and Fox, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week’s guest is Zuzanna Stamirowska, Pathway’s CEO and Co-founder. The startup is building the foundations for enterprise AI systems that think and learn in real-time as humans do. You can find it on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Charlie Fink is an author and futurist focused on spatial computing. See his books here. Spatial Beats contains insights and inputs from Fink’s collaborators, including Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Shilowitz.
More from AR Insider…
