OpenAI didn’t kill its splashy AI video app, Sora, because of copyright chaos or “focus” issues; it shut it down because it was chewing through obscene amounts of compute while users quickly lost interest in the endless stream of AI-generated junk.
“I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that,” Altman said. “But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies.”
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OpenAI announced it was shuttering Sora in late March, something that reportedly came as a shock to Disney. Released only last September to considerable fanfare, it unleashed a storm of surreal AI creations like SpongeBob cooking meth, Altman grilling dead Pikachus, clips mocking dead celebrities, and spoof Pixar-style trailers featuring Jeffrey Epstein.
And there was also the not-so-surreal: photorealistic depictions of people shoplifting, and other faked crimes, proliferated. The former raised significant concerns over potential copyright infringement, while the latter fueled discussions over the app being yet another source of effortless misinformation.
Turns out “the future of creativity” is a lot less compelling when it’s indistinguishable from an infinite scroll of uncanny garbage and a lot less viable when every clip costs a small fortune to generate. Sora wasn’t killed by critics or regulators; it died the way a lot of AI hype cycles do, collapsing under the weight of its own promises, its own price tag, and the uncomfortable realization that people get bored with AI slop faster than you can scale it.
It simply comes down to OpenAI realizing Sora would never be profitable. Thank goodness they just got $10 billion in additional funding to burn on their other products.
I missed this...when did "compute" become a noun?
"...chewing through obscene amounts of compute while users quickly lost interest..."
...Altman said. “But we need to concentrate our compute..."