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OpenAI Sora 2 is Here 🔥
How to create AI mini-apps using only text prompts
Gina Acosta
October 01, 2025
In partnership with
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
It’s only been a day since OpenAI launched Sora 2, and incredibly realistic AI videos are already flooding social media. The startup promises a huge leap compared to the Sora released just months ago and is also introducing a new Sora app.
Let’s get into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Sora 2 Is Officially Here and Comes With Its Own Social Network
Microsoft Brings “Vibe Working” to Excel and Word with New Agent Mode and Office Agent
AI Tutorial: How to create AI mini-apps using only text prompts
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
OPENAI
Sora 2 Is Officially Here and Comes With New Social App
Video generated by Sora 2
OpenAI has finally launched its highly anticipated next-generation flagship video generation model, Sora 2, along with a new iOS social media-like app called Sora, powered by the new video model.
Details
Sora 2 offers significantly improved photorealism and physics, better handling of complex motion (like skate tricks and tumbling), and the ability to generate sound that pairs with the video, including effects, backgroundscapes, and human speech.
Sora 2 can create videos up to 10 seconds long, and users can now inject elements of the real world into their creations.
Beyond video generation, the Sora app lets users discover other people's creations in a customizable Sora feed, remix friends' generations, and even drop themselves into friends' creations via a “cameo” feature (requires the person’s consent, which can be revoked at any time).
The Sora iOS app is now available in the US and Canada, with rollout to other countries planned in the coming days and weeks.
For now, Sora 2 is free with usage limits for all users, while ChatGPT Pro subscribers gain access to a higher-quality ‘Sora 2 Pro’ model; you need an invite to access it through Sora.com (OpenAI will prioritize Sora 1 power users, ChatGPT Pro subscribers, then Plus and Team plans—watch for the invite notification).
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MICROSOFT
Microsoft Brings “Vibe Working” to Excel and Word with New Agent Mode and Office Agent
Microsoft is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word, along with a new Office Agent in Copilot Chat powered by Anthropic models, bringing what the company calls "vibe working" to Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Details:
Agent Mode in Excel and Word makes the complex features of these apps more accessible to non-experts, allowing users to generate high-quality documents and spreadsheets by collaborating with Copilot through simple prompts. Support for PowerPoint is coming soon.
In tests, Excel’s Agent Mode hit 57.2% accuracy on SpreadsheetBench, above several AI rivals but still below human performance at 71.3%.
The Office Agent in Copilot Chat is available at launch for PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. It can generate full presentations and documents from a prompt, perform web research, and display live previews.
Availability starts today in the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscribers in the US, with Agent Mode for Excel and Word initially available only in the web versions and desktop support coming soon.
AI Tutorial
How to create AI mini-apps using only text prompts
Note: Opal by Google is free and available only in the US for now.
Go to Opal and sign in with your Google account.
Click “Create New” and describe what you want your app to do, or remix an existing app from the gallery.
“Create a high-quality YouTube thumbnail generator based on my YouTube videos. I will provide a video URL, and I want you to read the transcript and generate a clean, modern, and simple thumbnail.”
Opal will generate the workflow automatically. Edit it if you need to.
Click Start to run your app.
Publish your app and share it for others to use immediately with their own Google account.
AI Tools to check out
🖥️ Auron: Turns your computer into a companion that manages tasks, performs actions, and talks with you naturally.
🦾 Vivgrid: Helps developers and startups build, and deploy AI agents with observability, evaluation, and safety guardrails.
🔊 AudioConvert: Instantly convert your audio into accurate text with AI.
AI Findings/Resources
👀 What happens if you tell Claude to make a clone of Claude(dot)ai?
📈 AI data centers are sending power bills soaring
✍ Effective context engineering for AI agents – Anthropic
The latest in AI and Tech
Google announced that AI Mode will now show a variety of visual results for conversational search queries, allowing users to ask follow-up questions or explore links for more information. The multimodal experience also lets users start searches by uploading an image.
Disney’s legal team alleged that Character AI was damaging its brand and exploiting its intellectual property by allowing unauthorized chatbots of its characters, such as Elsa from Frozen and Darth Vader from Star Wars.
Google is enhancing Google Drive for desktop with AI-powered ransomware detection using an AI model trained on “millions of real-world ransomware samples” that will “look for signals that a file has been maliciously modified.”
When the AI detects potential ransomware activity, such as attempts to encrypt or corrupt multiple files, it automatically stops Drive file syncing, notifies users on their desktop and via email, and provides the option to restore files to a previous version.
Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus have founded Periodic Labs, raising a massive $300M seed round from backers including a16z, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Dean.
The startup aims to automate scientific discovery by creating AI scientists that run autonomous labs, conducting experiments, collecting data, and iterating without human intervention.
Zhipu AI has rolled out GLM-4.6, an open-source language model with a 200,000-token context window, stronger reasoning, and enhanced coding skills.
In real-world tests, it nearly matches Claude Sonnet 4, winning 48.6% of head-to-head comparisons, and outperforms Deepseek-V3.2-Exp across eight benchmarks.
The model available on Z.ai, OpenRouter, HuggingFace, and ModelScope.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻