• The Meta
  • Posts
  • ▲ OpenAI's Sora 2: Create Hollywood-Quality Videos

▲ OpenAI's Sora 2: Create Hollywood-Quality Videos

AND: Shopify Magic AI puts e-commerce marketing on autopilot

Author

Matt Lok
October 06, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Welcome future tech & AI enthusiasts — this week’s highlights:

  • OpenAI launched Sora 2 with integrated audio for professional video creation.

  • Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, their strongest model for automation and coding.

  • Perplexity made Comet browser free worldwide with built-in AI assistance.

  • Shopify Magic auto-generates product descriptions, ads, and SEO content.

Let’s get into it.

In today’s issue:

▲ AI VIDEO

Create professional marketing videos without a production team with Sora 2.

What you need to know

  • Launch: OpenAI released Sora 2 on September 30, 2025, generating up to 10-second clips (20 seconds for Pro users) with dialogue, sound effects, and background music synced to visuals

  • Capabilities: Physics simulation now works correctly. Objects behave realistically with proper momentum, gravity, and material properties instead of the weird glitches from earlier AI video tools

  • Feature: The Cameos feature lets you insert yourself or team members into AI-generated scenarios, useful for personalised sales videos or team content

Key Ideas

▲ Sora 2 lets small businesses compete with enterprise budgets by producing professional-quality content at a fraction of the cost and time.

▲ PRESENTED BY ENTERPRET

How Canva, Perplexity and Notion turn feedback chaos into actionable customer intelligence

You’re sitting on a goldmine of feedback: tickets, surveys, reviews, but can’t mine it.

Manual tagging doesn’t scale, and insights fall through the cracks.

Enterpret’s AI unifies all feedback, auto‑tags themes, and ties them to revenue/CSAT, surfacing what matters to customers.

The result: faster decisions, clearer priorities, and stronger retention.

▲ AI BUSINESS

From personalised pitches to design iterations, Claude got even better with Sonnet 4.5.

What you need to know

  • Launch: Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 4.5 on September 30, 2025, designed specifically for long-horizon autonomy, meaning it handles complex multi-step projects without breaking down mid-task

  • Performance: It achieves top scores on SWE-bench Verified with fewer iterations to complete software tasks, and excels at creative content generation, coding, and workflow automation

  • Cost: Pricing stays identical to Claude 3.5 Sonnet at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens

Key Idea

▲ Claude Sonnet 4.5 turns one marketer into a team of specialists, handling everything from copywriting to data analysis while maintaining your brand voice and strategic direction.

▲ AI BROWSERS

Comet browser by Perplexity is a built-in AI assistant for research and productivity.

What you need to know

  • Launch: Perplexity made Comet free worldwide on October 2, 2025, after three months at $200/month for Max subscribers

  • How it Works: The sidecar assistant stays alongside your browsing, answering questions about pages, summarising content, managing tabs, and navigating sites automatically

  • Features: Built-in tools include Discover (personalised content), Shopping (deal-finding), Travel (booking aggregation), and Finance (expense tracking)

Key Idea

▲ Comet has the potential to speed up productivity by providing helpful AI within your web browsing experience. Although there is concerns over data security.

▲ AI ECOMMERCE

Shopify Magic helps cut freelance costs and optimise faster with AI-powered store management.

What you need to know

  • Features: Shopify Magic auto-generates product descriptions that convert, saving store owners 10+ hours per week on content creation.

  • Performance: Shopify Sidekick handles tasks through plain English commands like “Set up a 10% discount for my summer collection” or “What were my best-sellers last month?”

  • Access: Shopify Magic is built into all Shopify plans, eliminating freelance content costs with automatic product descriptions, email campaigns, customer chat responses, and AI-powered image editing

Key Idea

▲ Shopify Magic AI is a boost for e-commerce by enhancing marketing efforts that woul have required multiple freelancers into an automated growth engine that runs 24/7.

▲ AI XR

No sensors, no complex setup. Just AI turning your Quest 3 camera into a reality portal. Try the web demo here. (recommend using your phone)

What you need to know

  • Launch: Decart released DecartXR in Sept 28th 2025, a free open-source mixed reality app for Meta Quest 3 that transforms physical environments into customizable art styles using AI

  • Company: The AI model was built by Decart AI, a startup that raised $100 million at a $3.1 billion valuation in August 2025

  • Workflow: Voice control lets you modify reality with commands like “make it snow” or “turn my friend into a robot”. Available art styles include anime, Dubai skyline, cyberpunk, and Versailles Palace themes.

Key Idea

▲ DecartXR allows businesses to create immersive brand experiences, product demos in multiple visual styles, and unique marketing content without post-production editing or physical set construction

▲ EVEN MORE NEWS

Other big ideas from the past week.

YouTube’s new creative tools

  • Zoom AI Avatars: Zoom launched photorealistic AI avatars (coming December 2025) that mimic live video feeds, allowing users to maintain a professional appearance in meetings even when not camera-ready, with integrated voice synthesis and gesture tracking

  • Google Gemini in Chrome: Google rolled out Gemini integration directly into Chrome browser on October 2, 2025, enabling users to ask AI questions about webpages, schedule meetings through Calendar, search YouTube timestamps, and access AI Mode from the address bar without switching tabs

  • YouTube AI Video Tools: YouTube integrated Google DeepMind’s Veo 3 Fast into Shorts, letting creators generate video backgrounds with audio from text prompts, convert dialogue into songs, and transform photos into video clips, plus a likeness detection tool to combat AI deepfakes

The Lab

▲ AI EDUCATION

▲ AI Headshot Magic: Pro Photos from a Single Image

Transform your single photo into professional headshots using AI – no expensive equipment needed. Discover an easy workflow to create polished, business-ready images with stunning accuracy and detail.

mail.metalabs.global/p/how-to-create-professional-headshots-with-ai-using-just-1-photo

With just one photo, you can create your own polished, business-ready headshots. No expensive equipment or editing software needed. Learn how here.

🔬 Interested in learning about AI for business? Let us know what you want to learn & join The Lab waitlist.

▲ AI IMAGE SHOWCASE

Create this type of image with Midjourney

SREF: --sref 2602821834

A cute little woman, long wavy dark brown hair, biblical outfit, full body, clipart, watercolor, simple design, white background, pastel pink, warm beige, and muted orange colors, simple shapes, clipart isolated white background, suitable for nursery decor and a children's book illustration.

Image Usage Suggestion: Illustrations for graphic design print or web

💌 Reply to this email with your AI image generation or suggestion of what you’d like to see and I'll feature it in a future newsletter.

▲ SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Help shape the content you see here by giving feedback

You can add more feedback after choosing an option

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Have specific feedback or want to get in touch? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you.

Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it to a friend and have them sign up here.

Thanks for reading — until next time.

Stay curious,
Matt Lok, Editor

Brought to you by metalabs. Helping boost your brand’s visibility and attract more leads through branding & digital marketing.