OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence video app Sora has already grabbed the top spot in Apple‘s App Store as its number one free app, despite being invite-only.

Sora, which was launched on Tuesday, allows users to create short-form AI videos and share them in a feed. The app is available to iPhone users but requires an invite code to access.

Here’s how to snag a Sora app invite code:

• First, download the app from the iOS App Store. Note that Sora requires iOS 18.0 or later to be downloaded.
• Login using your OpenAI account.
• Click “Notify me when access opens.”

A screen will then appear asking for an access code.

Currently, OpenAI has said that it is prioritizing paying ChatGPT Pro users for Sora access. The app is only available in the U.S. and Canada, but is expected to roll out to additional countries soon, the company said.

If you do not know someone who can provide an access code, several people are sharing invite codes on the official OpenAI Discord server, as well as on X and Reddit threads.

Once you input your access, you will be able to start generating AI videos using text or images. Users are also able to cameo as characters in their videos as well as “remix” other posts.

The app is powered by the new Sora 2.0 model, an updated version of the original Sora model from last year. The video generation model is “physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable” than prior systems, the company said in a blog post.

TURIN, Italy — Artificial intelligence is currently in an “industrial bubble” but the technology is “real” and will bring big benefits to society, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos said on Friday.

The term bubble usually refers to a period of inflated stock prices or valuations of companies that have disconnected from the fundamentals of a business. One of the most famous bubbles that burst was the 2000 dotcom crash where the value of internet companies plummeted.

Exor CEO John Elkann asked Bezos on stage at Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy whether there were signs that the current AI industry is in bubble.

“This is a kind of industrial bubble,” the Amazon founder said.

Bezos laid out some of the key characteristics of bubbles, noting that when they happen, stock prices are “disconnected from the fundamentals” of a business.

“The second thing that happens is that people get very excited like they are today about artificial intelligence,” Bezos added.

During bubbles, every experiment or idea gets funded, he told the audience.

“The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And that’s also probably happening today,” Bezos said.

“But that doesn’t mean anything that is happening isn’t real. AI is real, and it is going to change every industry.”

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Artificial intelligence companies are the hottest ticket items in today’s startup ecosystem but the pace of change is dominated by developments at OpenAI and Anthropic. For startups building on top of their models, it’s sink or swim. 

With the U.S. currently surging ahead in the large language model (LLM) race, which demands huge checks, Europe’s opportunity lies in building tools that make AI useful, which is known as the application layer.

“That’s also where we think most of the profit will be made in the future,” Robert Lacher, a founding partner of Visionaries Club, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this year. 

Generative AI companies clinched $49.2 billion in venture capital (VC) investment in the first half of 2025, surpassing 2024’s $44.2 billion across the whole year, according to consultancy EY. The U.S. is responsible for the majority of that, accounting for 97% of deal value and 62% of volume; Europe represented just 2% of value, but 23% of volume. 

Risk appetite among VC investors on the continent is typically lower than in the U.S., while market fragmentation has long caused challenges for startups looking to scale quickly. Hungover from the 2021 tech boom and amid an economic downturn, steady growth and sound business metrics have also come back into focus in Europe. AI is still drawing eyeballs but it pales in comparison to the U.S. 

Now, frequent updates of AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are pushing companies built on top of them to iterate faster or risk falling behind.

Europe does have its own LLM company – Mistral, the French startup that has raised 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) in capital so far, including from Dutch chipmaker ASML – that is positioned as an open-source competitor to OpenAI, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.

“The speed of innovation, speed of product velocity, speed of distribution, actually ends up winning over everything else,” Bryan Kim, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday from Italian Tech Week.

Sweden’s Lovable, a “vibe-coding” platform that enables others to build apps and websites with AI, and AI agent startup Sana are examples of such companies putting AI to use. Meanwhile, London’s AI video generation startup Synthesia and synthetic audio company ElevenLabs, also have specific AI applications. The latter did, however, later build its own LLM. 

But “what does it mean when the product and technology you’re actually relying on changes every month. How do you move any slower than that and expect to win the game?” Kim said.

“What I came around with is, actually, momentum is the moat at this current juncture of AI development. Maybe we’ll get to a point where the model layer stabilizes it a little bit, and then we could talk about other things, but, right now, momentum is the only moat that I see,” he added.

Indeed, British AI cloud company Nscale just nabbed $433 million in new funding, hot on the heels of a $1.1 billion Series B – the largest in Europe – announced just days ago. However, like Mistral, Nscale is an AI infrastructure play rather than application layer – a timely development as AI sovereignty continues to grab political and investor attention. 

For Lovable CEO Anton Osika, it’s much more simple. “The only thing we need to do in Europe is change our mindset that it is possible,” he told “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday.

“Traditionally it has been more of a constraint with access to the amount of technical talent, of access to capital, that is not the bottleneck anymore,” he argued. 

Osika’s own company, for example, can act as a CEO’s technical cofounder if they need one. Meanwhile, Lovable is also luring top talent from the U.S. to Sweden to work at the startup, Osika said. 

He added: “It’s much faster for us to hire in Europe than it is to do so for U.S. counterparts, where there’s 1,000 more companies like Lovable, so it is a competitive advantage to be building from Europe.”