The overlap between CapCut enthusiasts and GitHub users is not that big. Non-technical TikTok/Instagram influencers aren’t flocking to GitHub to star the project, not to mention it’s useless to them at this stage. This kind of project, if very successful, may amass 10k to 20k organic stars in a few years. (I say this as someone who has both served on the maintainer team of a huge, household-name-in-tech kind of project with ~50k stars, and had personal projects in the 1-10k star range.)
Compare this to openai/whisper, which was a huge release at the time by the hottest AI unicorn (1.7k points on HN for the release), immediately useful and with much better user alignment: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi... The star growth was no comparison to this one person early stage project.
So I agree with others, there’s basically no chance this is organic.
To add another point of comparison, at the moment this is almost matching the velocity of DeepSeek R1 from Jan 20 to Jan 29, which, if you recall, was such a hot topic it triggered a huge market crash: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi.... Unbelievable.
Compare this to openai/whisper, which was a huge release at the time by the hottest AI unicorn (1.7k points on HN for the release), immediately useful and with much better user alignment: https://www.star-history.com/#OpenCut-app/OpenCut&openai/whi... The star growth was no comparison to this one person early stage project.
So I agree with others, there’s basically no chance this is organic.