Posted by mikeocool 5 hours ago
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh..., https://archive.ph/ABkeI
Sora was the first product OpenAI shipped where I felt that fell into that second category, and for that I was very disappointed. You have all those GPUs, and the most incredible technology in the world, and the most brilliant engineers, and all you can think to do with them is to make an app that just makes meme videos? I mean, c'mon!
Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there? Even if Sora wasn't a spectacular success, it seems to me like subsequent model improvements could have moved the needle - shutting it down so soon seems premature.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
24/7 titillation is boring
Sometimes people want to paint, sometimes people want a painting.
To have wonderful time with their mom… I bet they had absolutely zero interest in the act and process of making silly videos.
Read the main comment out loud to yourself while imagining it’s someone sitting at a table at a pub.
Now imagine someone turning to this person in the pub, and speaking the subsequent comment, word for word.
No seriously, try it out.
Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep us coming back."
If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora.
The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for that one?
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.
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
Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product"
Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it.
Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.
1. There's an AI-based virtual girlfriend industry that mixes text and images
2. There's an AI-based virtual boyfriend industry that is essentially all text (and not always distinguishable from the normal chat models)
3. There's a much shadier AI-based "undress this specific woman" industry
It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth.
On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.
I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.
Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for
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.
I'd rather eat poison
If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind.
Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.
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. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a social network has to renegotiate their IP license.
People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0.
People want to generate IP.
edit: clarity
It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way.
Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me
The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.
In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...
Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.
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
Where can I get this data?
I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that. However stuff still sneaks by…
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-...
Bummer. It used to be at:
https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
So last year, these were the top videos:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtu...
There's this, but it's nowhere near as good as seeing the actual videos:
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.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.
Shovel selling and instruments to dismantle whats left of working class power.
This did happen once. 3 people were laid off, I think directly based on things I said to drive the completion of some automation. That was the last time I ever measured something in man-hours to make a point. I’ll never do it again. That was over 12 years ago.
Step 2: win back public trust by firing Sam Altman or dropping defense contracts or something else I can’t think of.
I also wonder if they got the $1B from Disney? Was that even a paid for deal? Or just another "announced" deal? Every article I found doesn't mention anyone signing any paperwork - which seems to be typical of AI journalism these days. Every AI deal is supposedly inked but if you dig deeper, all you find are adjectives like proclaimed, announced, agreed upon.
They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in developer mind share (see, people who buy tokens) and want a piece.
I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.
Will be interesting to see.
ChatGPT is an interesting product - I like it for certain things - but after last year's PR scramble almost all the news out of OpenAI is a disappointment, with hovering hints of retrenchment.
Want to hear the one TRICK most people forget when doing X...?Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?