OpenAI just released a video of CEO Sam Altman and Jony Ive talking in a San Francisco café about merging Ive’s hardware startup Io with the AI lab.
Crypto Twitter promptly FOMOed past launching 10,000 IO-INU-DOGE-SAMMA tokens and latched onto the headline question: did OpenAI deepfake its own corporate announcement? Within hours, #Sora2 trended harder than most memecoins.
Altman is spending about $6.4 billion in equity to pull Io under the OpenAI umbrella, promising a device that rewrites personal computing. Yet the internet cares less about the spreadsheet and more about whether the latte foam in the clip was synthetically rendered. The comment section turned into a shitstorm of frame-by-frame forensic threads.
One viewer swore the camera shift at 1:10 “isn’t possible yet,” while another countered that sloppy lighting and an overzealous denoise filter can make even carbon-based CEOs look waxy.
The most conclusive evidence that the San Francisco location in the video is not based on real life came from Zak’s who pointed out that “you should be triggered by not seeing even one Waymo here. Sora2 ~= Veo3.”
Meanwhile, a balcony “Open AI video comments (Source: Kristof)” video surfaced, which, in 2021, would have ‘proved’ its authenticity. However, this only deepens the confusion because apparently, anyone can fake shaky phone footage now, too.
The Altman-Ive duet may be OpenAI’s magnum opus of hype. Conspiracists cite uncanny eye contact, perfectly balanced table reflections, and the fact that neither man spills espresso, a statistical miracle in San Francisco.
The cafe itself has been identified as a real place in San Francisco, but so has the Empire State Building, and frontier AI-video models can easily replicate that.
Then arrived the ethics brigade arguing that releasing an undisclosed AI-generated video would deserve “crippling sanctions,” a phrase usually reserved for rogue states, not press releases.
A different camp shrugged: if the clip is synthetic, at least the algorithms finally nailed conversational awkwardness.
Somewhere in the noise, a lone account asked whether any of this affects the actual hardware road map; silence.
Lost in the discourse is the basic fact that OpenAI and Io now share a cap table and probably a fridge of La Croix. The plan is still to ship something pocketable by 2026.
Whether the launch livestream stars real humans or the cartoonishly smooth Altman-Ive avatars will hinge on how much GPU budget survives the bear market.
So yes, the video might be real, partly real, or a full Sora fan-edit previewing a world where reality is merely a settings toggle. The internet will keep hitting replay, hunting for the frame where truth blinks.
OpenAI probably counts each view as market research, and if the headset-less gizmo ever ships, nostalgia will set in for the days when people still trusted their own eyes.
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