OpenAI's Sora Hits 1 Million Downloads Faster Than ChatGPT

While every startup founder is striving to find their way to San Francisco, Duolingo says no!! I am good here in Pittsburgh and here’s why 👇

If you use Figma, get ready for a game-changer. The popular design platform has teamed up with Google to embed its powerful Gemini AI models directly into its tools. Think of it as a huge productivity upgrade designed to make your creative workflow faster and smoother than ever before.

The most exciting news is how much faster this makes your work, especially when dealing with visuals. By integrating Google's specialized AI, like Gemini 2.5 Flash and the image-focused Imagen 4, creating or editing images in Figma is getting a massive lift. In early tests, Figma’s "Make Image" feature became about 50% faster. That means less waiting for your visuals to generate and more time actually designing.

With Gemini AI built right into the platform, you can now generate high-quality hero images or assets instantly just by typing a prompt, all without leaving your design file.

This isn't just a fun new feature; it’s built for serious business. For large organizations, the partnership focuses on enterprise-grade controls and security. This means IT teams can manage how AI features are used, and admins can control whether their company’s content is used to train the AI models, an important security feature for big companies.

This integration confirms that AI is quickly becoming a core part of the design process, ensuring Figma's 13 million monthly active users can tap into their creativity with less friction and maximum speed.

OpenAI has a new massive hit on its hands. The company’s latest app, Sora, which lets users create AI-generated videos, has officially been downloaded over one million times in under five days.

That achievement is a big deal because it means Sora hit the million-download milestone even faster than the original ChatGPT app did when it first launched. This surging demand confirms that AI-generated video is quickly becoming the next frontier in consumer tech.

What makes this even more impressive is that Sora is currently invite-only and only available in the U.S. and Canada. Despite these limitations, the app, which is powered by OpenAI's advanced Sora 2 model and works similarly to a TikTok feed for AI clips, shot straight to the top of the App Store rankings within days of its September 30 launch. The app allows users to create realistic, cinematic, and even anime-style videos from simple text prompts, and even lets people insert their own likeness using a "cameo" feature.

However, the viral success hasn't been without controversy. The app’s ability to generate videos featuring recognizable, copyrighted characters like those from Nintendo and Disney has sparked debate about ownership and content moderation. In response, OpenAI is already working on new controls to give intellectual property owners the ability to decide how or whether their characters can be used in these AI-generated videos.

Regardless of the challenges, Sora’s explosive growth shows that the public is more than ready to dive into the world of AI-created moving pictures.

Google is taking its AI coding assistant, Gemini CLI (Command Line Interface), to the next level by introducing a new extensions system. If you're one of the over one million developers already using this open-source, AI-powered tool in your terminal, get ready for a massive boost in productivity.

The Gemini CLI is essentially an AI agent for your command line, letting you use natural language to perform complex coding tasks. The new extensions act as powerful add-ons, allowing you to connect the AI directly to external tools and services without ever having to leave your terminal window.

These extensions are essentially pre-packaged integrations that connect the Gemini CLI to everything from databases and design platforms to payment services. Each one comes with a "playbook" that instantly teaches the AI how to use that specific tool effectively, meaning you get meaningful results right away without any complex setup. This launch includes extensions from a wide range of industry partners like Stripe, Shopify, Figma, and Postman, alongside new options created by Google itself.

The goal is simple, to stop developers from constantly switching between their terminal and other tools. By putting Gemini CLI at the center of this new ecosystem, Google is giving developers the power to customize and build a personalized toolchain that perfectly fits their unique workflow. This move solidifies Google's commitment to making AI a core, integrated part of the everyday coding experience.

Duolingo, the wildly popular language-learning app, has made a firm and public declaration, it will never open an office in San Francisco. This bold statement flies in the face of decades of tradition, where opening an office in the Bay Area was seen as a necessary badge of honor for any successful tech company.

Duolingo, which has grown into a publicly traded company with over 40 million daily active users, is instead doubling down on its roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stating clearly that for them, Pittsburgh is not a "backup plan" to Silicon Valley, but their strategic choice.

This decision is driven by a clear focus on culture, cost, and talent. By staying out of San Francisco, the company avoids the sky-high operating costs of the Bay Area, which allows them to offer competitive compensation in a city with a much lower cost of living. This strategy helps them attract talent who want meaningful work without the financial sacrifice that comes with living in a super-expensive city.

Furthermore, being headquartered in Pittsburgh, a growing tech hub with strong ties to research institutions like Carnegie Mellon University, gives Duolingo access to a rich talent pool. By drawing a bright line around its expansion plans, Duolingo is sending a message to the rest of the tech world that the best path to success is the one that suits your product and people, not the prestige of a specific ZIP code.

Instantly turn text into pro-quality videos with AI. Smart prompts create perfect clips for social media and business.