ChatGPT Easter egg turns selfies into Sora-powered Santa videos

On its face this is just a cute holiday stunt, but it’s also a live demo of where OpenAI wants to go: frictionless, consumer‑friendly video generation powered by Sora under the hood. Asking for a single emoji, a selfie and then returning a bespoke, fully AI‑generated narrative shows how much orchestration and safety work has gone into making advanced video models feel like a toy rather than a lab experiment. That’s how you normalise very powerful generative capabilities for hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

From an AGI‑race perspective, the Easter egg is a way to battle‑test Sora’s reliability, latency and content filters at scale without formally “launching a product” that would invite direct comparison with rivals. It also builds habit: users who experience delightful, on‑demand video experiences inside ChatGPT are more likely to see OpenAI as their default creative platform. For competitors, it’s a reminder that the race isn’t just about releasing models; it’s about embedding them into playful, viral experiences that quietly gather training data and user trust.