“What you made with Sora mattered”. Idk why that sentence irks me so much. Perhaps because the “how” is bit vague. I like to think that what I made in the toilet this morning also mattered.
It's a wonderful combination of vague, patronizing, and self-promoting. "Mattered" is meaningless. The tone sounds like when you tell a child their scribble is so pretty. And the cherry on top, the users didn't make anything with Sora, they just fed a bit of input into the machine and it made the stuff. So this is really OpenAI saying that what they themselves did mattered.
I thought AI video was the future? Now the biggest AI company in the world is straight up shutting their service down because it's too expensive? Simply a disaster for OpenAI and the industry as a whole.
They're shutting down Sora, not AI-generated video.
From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."
It's the timeline of AI video that doesn't align with OpenAI. It's still far away for prompt to movie and they don't want to be another tool in the pipe for VFX because it doesn't pay. Other models are running circles around them because they focused on the needs of professionals in the space and not toys.
The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that
> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.
But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.
We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture.
Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.
It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP.
I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music.
People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP. The interest faded immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0.
Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way there.
I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.
In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.
This will happen with most offerings made by the major AI labs. Inference is expensive, and the closer they get to AGI, the higher the opportunity to use compute for inference rather than training, especially if it’s for making what is essentially entertainment that many people
hate on principle.
Indeed. But they won't get to "AGI", because that goal isn't even remotely defined. A "human-level" intelligence implies a large number of properties that cannot exist inside an inference machine. Dreams, for example, might be considered to be a part of "human-level" intelligence. Will the machine dream?
What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you kill someone?
AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that anyone actually wants.
agi just means a machine, system or whatever that can do anything as least as well as a human. The details dont matter as much as its ability to match humans in everything they are paid money to do.
And obviously if such a system existed, the benefits (and risks) would be enormous, though the risks are smaller if
you control it vs someone else, which is why every company is racing towards it.
Disney's involvement with this was always strange. Their business lives and dies on the strength of their characters and their designs - why would you risk allowing a service to dilute them down and maybe misuse them?
May be incompatible with OpenAI possibly becoming more PG-13 rated in the future?
I had thought this would be combined with OpenAI launching a set top box where you could talk to an AI avatar. Disney IP could have been skins to sell people for their AIs.
If someone doesn't care enough to suck at something (in this case, video creation) then why should we bother consuming their output? We all have our own streams of mental diarrhea already, so there's no need to drink from the tsunami of polished turds.
The only people I've seen post AI Disney content was in the Facebook groups for the parks / cruises. Before that it was whatever clipart they could find. There's just no market for it. No one is going to pay to make fake disney art.
Smart move. No clear path to growing meaningful revenue mixed with very expensive inference costs is not a good mix ahead of an IPO --- oh and not to mention competitors in TikTok and Instagram that are doing just fine.
Well, now they're no longer even close to being the leader in image & video gen. They aren't the leader in coding. They are losing market share in the chatbot domain too.
So I agree with you, but also it makes me wonder what they're even selling when the IPO happens (supposedly as early as late summer 2026)? Data centers? Partnerships with the goverment?
Is it a smart move? Or just plainly obvious when Sora was probably hemorraghing money and had no future? A smarter move would have not to make this horrible product that no one wanted in the first place
After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for now removing my hand?
Depends, did you also fire the people who told you not to do it, and layoff the people who reluctantly installed the stove and preheated it for you as part of your exciting stove-touching initiative?
Sora had to be shut down because it was the clearest, most consequential demonstration that OpenAI’s models are running way, way ahead of their ability to align/jail them effectively.
The Occam's Razor position (Sora was the most expensive to operate, least monetizable model) seems like a simpler explanation. The legal costs/difficulty on top of "most expensive" are just the cherry on top.
Nope. It was just a bad product that no one wanted. It’s not a super-secret indicator that OpenAI is actually going to take over the world any day now.
It's not because of the bubble. There is literally no advantage to generating slop videos. It looks cool for a while but no audience is going to consume such videos.
Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.
Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to entry and expectations of the market are so low you can't really differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.
So much for “replacing VFX artists”. It’s not necessarily a harbinger of doom for the AI industry, but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
It's more like the VFX market is too small for OpenAI to bother killing. They are only interested in business models that can justify a trillion dollar valuation.
> but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
I dont do design, or make videos, or ask ai for legal advice, or medical advice cause I lack the skill and understanding of these fields. Dunning Kruger still applies...
There is interesting "AI" content out there, clearly the person(s) behind it put some thought into it and had a vision.
True, I did try to make some useful 1 minute videos, and found it really difficult to arrive at a finished product
Sure, I can write the screenplay and Veo will generate it for me. But I don't have experience in video creation/production , so it is difficult for me to write good prompts which generate engaging video
Nothing like an ill-considered war with global economic consequences to bring reality crashing back down on Silicon Valley; sometimes life throws a big old margin call your way and things break down.
Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/
Not a great look that either the teams responsible for Sora didn't know this was coming or the decision was so brash that things changed overnight.
i guess the disney deal falling through was the impetus rather than vice versa
The app isn’t shutting down today, so they may have decided that the write up is still useful.
“What you made with Sora mattered”. Idk why that sentence irks me so much. Perhaps because the “how” is bit vague. I like to think that what I made in the toilet this morning also mattered.
It's a wonderful combination of vague, patronizing, and self-promoting. "Mattered" is meaningless. The tone sounds like when you tell a child their scribble is so pretty. And the cherry on top, the users didn't make anything with Sora, they just fed a bit of input into the machine and it made the stuff. So this is really OpenAI saying that what they themselves did mattered.
I thought AI video was the future? Now the biggest AI company in the world is straight up shutting their service down because it's too expensive? Simply a disaster for OpenAI and the industry as a whole.
Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far more valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.
Too bad they aren’t doing either!
They're shutting down Sora, not AI-generated video.
From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."
Is it still accessible in any of their apps, though? I don’t see it in ChatGPT.
It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has to make money.
It's the timeline of AI video that doesn't align with OpenAI. It's still far away for prompt to movie and they don't want to be another tool in the pipe for VFX because it doesn't pay. Other models are running circles around them because they focused on the needs of professionals in the space and not toys.
The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that
> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.
But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.
> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.
If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.
> look at US top videos on YouTube any given day
I'd rather eat poison
We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture.
Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.
It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP.
I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music.
People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP. The interest faded immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0.
> People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP.
Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests
as a sora user:
- sora was not great at making what you asked
- i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens
- every video that was good needed editing outside of sora (and therefore could not be shared within sora)
just my experience
Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way there.
I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.
In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.
This will happen with most offerings made by the major AI labs. Inference is expensive, and the closer they get to AGI, the higher the opportunity to use compute for inference rather than training, especially if it’s for making what is essentially entertainment that many people hate on principle.
Indeed. But they won't get to "AGI", because that goal isn't even remotely defined. A "human-level" intelligence implies a large number of properties that cannot exist inside an inference machine. Dreams, for example, might be considered to be a part of "human-level" intelligence. Will the machine dream?
What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you kill someone?
AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that anyone actually wants.
agi just means a machine, system or whatever that can do anything as least as well as a human. The details dont matter as much as its ability to match humans in everything they are paid money to do.
And obviously if such a system existed, the benefits (and risks) would be enormous, though the risks are smaller if you control it vs someone else, which is why every company is racing towards it.
Disney's involvement with this was always strange. Their business lives and dies on the strength of their characters and their designs - why would you risk allowing a service to dilute them down and maybe misuse them?
hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no longer needed now I guess :)
Are we sure it was in that order?
https://archive.ph/ABkeI
May be incompatible with OpenAI possibly becoming more PG-13 rated in the future?
I had thought this would be combined with OpenAI launching a set top box where you could talk to an AI avatar. Disney IP could have been skins to sell people for their AIs.
VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
Sora was not the only video generation service, it wasn’t even the gold standard.
Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.
I feel like in several years we will look back at how we treated our most creative minds in disgust. This behavior will not be readily forgiven.
I feel like in several years we’ll have much more capable video generation than Sora was capable of and we won’t look back at all.
I feel like you’re wrong. This is a clear signal that generative video is deeply unpopular.
If someone doesn't care enough to suck at something (in this case, video creation) then why should we bother consuming their output? We all have our own streams of mental diarrhea already, so there's no need to drink from the tsunami of polished turds.
It was the greatest thing yesterday.
Please name next attempt Roxis
Roxas*! Important because it’s sora rearranged (with an X for cool factor)
What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
They get to use if for services with better returns.
This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with or without Disney's blessing.
The only people I've seen post AI Disney content was in the Facebook groups for the parks / cruises. Before that it was whatever clipart they could find. There's just no market for it. No one is going to pay to make fake disney art.
Smart move. No clear path to growing meaningful revenue mixed with very expensive inference costs is not a good mix ahead of an IPO --- oh and not to mention competitors in TikTok and Instagram that are doing just fine.
Well, now they're no longer even close to being the leader in image & video gen. They aren't the leader in coding. They are losing market share in the chatbot domain too.
So I agree with you, but also it makes me wonder what they're even selling when the IPO happens (supposedly as early as late summer 2026)? Data centers? Partnerships with the goverment?
Is it a smart move? Or just plainly obvious when Sora was probably hemorraghing money and had no future? A smarter move would have not to make this horrible product that no one wanted in the first place
After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for now removing my hand?
Depends, did you also fire the people who told you not to do it, and layoff the people who reluctantly installed the stove and preheated it for you as part of your exciting stove-touching initiative?
If I were to get conspiracy-minded:
Sora had to be shut down because it was the clearest, most consequential demonstration that OpenAI’s models are running way, way ahead of their ability to align/jail them effectively.
The Occam's Razor position (Sora was the most expensive to operate, least monetizable model) seems like a simpler explanation. The legal costs/difficulty on top of "most expensive" are just the cherry on top.
probably more cost than anything. image and video gen don't have much in common with llms
Nope. It was just a bad product that no one wanted. It’s not a super-secret indicator that OpenAI is actually going to take over the world any day now.
It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...
It's not because of the bubble. There is literally no advantage to generating slop videos. It looks cool for a while but no audience is going to consume such videos.
Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.
> no audience is going to consume such videos
sir, have you seen tiktok?
I meant the longer video format, not tiktok. Tiktok is full of slop, both AI and human generated
Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to entry and expectations of the market are so low you can't really differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.
Sounds like a well disguised cope on your part. There absolutely is an audience (see reels, TikTok, etc.) and the tech will only get better from here.
You sound desperate to believe this. I think you could use a little more emotional distance here.
So much for “replacing VFX artists”. It’s not necessarily a harbinger of doom for the AI industry, but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
It's more like the VFX market is too small for OpenAI to bother killing. They are only interested in business models that can justify a trillion dollar valuation.
> but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
I dont do design, or make videos, or ask ai for legal advice, or medical advice cause I lack the skill and understanding of these fields. Dunning Kruger still applies...
There is interesting "AI" content out there, clearly the person(s) behind it put some thought into it and had a vision.
True, I did try to make some useful 1 minute videos, and found it really difficult to arrive at a finished product
Sure, I can write the screenplay and Veo will generate it for me. But I don't have experience in video creation/production , so it is difficult for me to write good prompts which generate engaging video
> feels like the bubble is starting to pop
May be. OpenAI shuttering Sora is line with them shifting focus towards b2b sales, instead of b2b2c or b2c.
Interestingly, Aditya Ramesh, who iirc was the Sora 1 lead, is now "VP of Robotics" at OpenAI per his Twitter bio: https://x.com/model_mechanic
Nothing like an ill-considered war with global economic consequences to bring reality crashing back down on Silicon Valley; sometimes life throws a big old margin call your way and things break down.
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