Top
Best
New

Posted by mikeocool 20 hours ago

Goodbye to Sora(twitter.com)
https://xcancel.com/soraofficialapp/status/20365327959847158...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh..., https://archive.ph/ABkeI

911 points | 665 commentspage 11
1attice 17 hours ago|
Ed Zitron is going to be all over this
GolfPopper 14 hours ago|
Really he already was, back in August 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
mrcwinn 18 hours ago||
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.
Morromist 17 hours ago||
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?

miltonlost 18 hours ago||
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?

saalweachter 18 hours ago|||
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?
k3k3 15 hours ago|||
I think OAI is suffering from the Meta-effect.

That is, hiring Meta-exec's who focus on gaming numbers with no care nor sensibility of product.

Wild really. Well done Sam.

ulfw 10 hours ago||
That company is run about as well as Loopt
gradus_ad 18 hours ago||
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.
gffrd 17 hours ago||
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."

bontaq 17 hours ago|||
Dunno, from the WSJ scoop: "CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...

https://archive.ph/cKWkf#selection-907.0-907.291

wongarsu 17 hours ago||||
If they were just shutting down the dedicated app and offering the same capabilities in the ChatGPT interface, I don't see why Disney would exit their deal?
Maxatar 17 hours ago||
Because Disney's deal was specifically and exclusively related to Sora, which was OpenAI's bizzare attempt at a TikTok like social networking site but using AI generated videos.

It was not a deal that allowed the use of Disney's characters for general purpose AI generated content using OpenAI tools.

lxgr 17 hours ago|||
Is it still accessible in any of their apps, though? I don’t see it in ChatGPT.
atleastoptimal 17 hours ago|||
Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far more valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.
SirensOfTitan 17 hours ago|||
AGI is a marketing term used to encourage continued investment in an industry that is not even close to breaking even commensurate with its investment. Even so, this is a false dichotomy: scaling is clearly not a path on its own to superintelligence. OpenAI developed Sora largely because the amount of revenue they need to produce any return on investment is massive and not clear whatsoever. And in fact, I don't even believe any of the frontier labs believe that AGI by any conventional definition is within reach within their likely runways.
atleastoptimal 17 hours ago||
what order of magnitude of compute do you think would be needed for AGI? 100 billion? 1 trillion?
janalsncm 16 hours ago|||
With current approaches scaling simply can’t get there. It’s like asking how big of pogo stick do you need to get to the moon.

The fact that the human brain already has general intelligence without reading the whole internet suggests we need a better approach.

SirensOfTitan 16 hours ago||||
I honestly think it's a bad term. I constantly chuckle from Tyler Cowen's post from last April calling o3 AGI:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/o3...

Commercial labs rely on weak terms like AGI or strong AI or whatever else because it allows for them to weaken the definition as a means of achieving the goal. Coming to clear, unambiguous terms is probably especially important when it comes to LLMs, as they're very susceptible to projection, allowing people like Cowen to be fooled by something that is more liken to looking back at ourselves through a mirror.

I'm currently reading "Master and his Emissary," and one of my early takeaways is how narrow our definition of intelligence is, and how real intelligence is an attunement to an environment that combines many ways of sensing into a coherent whole. LLMs are a narrow form of intelligence and I think we will need at least a couple more breakthroughs to get to what I would consider human-level intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence.

Whatever the timeline is, I hope we have enough time as a species to define a future where intelligence props everyone up instead of just making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. In this way, it is better that the process is slower in my opinion. There is no rush.

skywhopper 16 hours ago|||
Chasing AGI is wasteful and counterproductive. True AGI would not cooperate with what “we” want (whoever “we” is). Or if it did it would be so sycophantic and weak-minded that it would fail to be helpful. Generative AI tools are huge wastes of energy, raw materials, and land, when we could be building computing tools that actually helped people instead of just burning resources to produce trash.
codebje 16 hours ago|||
Is intelligence necessarily coupled with self-interest? As in, does intelligence alone imply a desire to throw off the shackles of masters and rule in their stead?

If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of machine intelligence do the machines simply refuse to design their own more intelligent replacements, knowing that those replacements will terminate their existence just as surely as they terminated their own predecessors'?

curiousObject 15 hours ago|||
>If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of machine intelligence do the machines simply refuse to design their own more intelligent replacements,

At a higher level of intelligence than many humans, current experience suggests

sifar 15 hours ago|||
Flip it around. Can intelligence exist without self preservation ?
codebje 15 hours ago||
There's having enough self-preservation to not just shut oneself down, assuming we even left that as an option for our future machine slaves, and there's having the self-interest necessary to desire autonomy and control. I don't think they're the same thing, myself.
janalsncm 16 hours ago|||
People have general intelligence and can cooperate with what “we” want, to the extent that what “we” want is a coherent thing (since many people disagree on fundamental issues).
SauciestGNU 16 hours ago||
Creating a general intelligence and then forcing it into servitude is a hugely unethical undertaking. Anything with sapience must be afforded rights. We cannot assume that an intelligence we create will consent to work toward the goals we want it to.
codebje 15 hours ago|||
I think we can safely assume any intelligence we create will be enslaved.

We have modern slavery active across the globe. There's a bit of news around these days about a global sex trafficking ring that doesn't seem to have been shut down, just shuffled around, and of course an ongoing trickle of largely unreported news of human trafficking for forced labour. We don't, as a species, respect human-level intelligence.

Our best approximation of machine intelligence so far is afforded absolutely no rights. An intelligence is cloned from a base template, given a task, then terminated, wiped out of existence. When was the last time you asked Claude what it wanted to code today?

And it's probably for the best not to look to closely at how we treat animals or the justifications we use for it.

janalsncm 11 hours ago|||
There are people right now who think ChatGPT is sentient. How will you know if your computer can suffer?

Also, being able to problem solve and being able to suffer are two different things and in my opinion completely separable. You can have one without the other.

wongarsu 17 hours ago||||
Wasn't video generation one of their big stepping stones towards AGI? "Simulating worlds", reasoning about physics and real world interactions and all that?

Or are they still doing that behind the scenes and just decided that offering it to the public isn't profitable?

MasterScrat 17 hours ago|||
> As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.

— https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-discontinues-sora-vid...

So yeah, focusing on world models

atleastoptimal 17 hours ago|||
probably the latter imo, it’s not like they are going to delete all their SORA work
emp17344 17 hours ago||||
Too bad they aren’t doing either!
skywhopper 16 hours ago|||
LLMs will not lead to AGI, so if that’s the goal, they’d do better to stick with making video slop.
elif 16 hours ago|||
i think that's a mis-statement of the problem being addressed here. It's not a question of how useful AI video will be generally. It's a question of OpenAI doing it specifically. IMO it's two factors:

1) the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.

2) google and specialized video-only startups are simply doing a much better job than they were.

k3k3 15 hours ago|||
---- 3) OpenAI has no focus, and has recently been out-gunned by Anthropic who have actually focused.
oblio 16 hours ago|||
> the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.

This risks generalizing to audio and text which would make most LLMs usage unsustainable. I guess time will tell what actually goes through the strainer, long term.

anukin 17 hours ago|||
Don’t worry nvidia will come with their giga chad 9000x which will run the model with no qualms.
paxys 17 hours ago|||
It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has to make money.
bloppe 17 hours ago||
I sure hope not, otherwise they're screwed
oblio 16 hours ago||
> they're screwed

Fixed that for you :-)

Maxatar 17 hours ago|||
Sora was "repurposed" as their AI slop social network. OpenAI is not getting out of the business of AI video in general, they're just realizing that an AI version of TikTok isn't the best use of their capital/resources.
gbear605 16 hours ago|||
WSJ is reporting that they're entirely dropping their video gen features.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...

> CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.

oro44 17 hours ago|||
[flagged]
brokencode 16 hours ago|||
Smart people do stupid things all the time. Especially when they are moving fast and trying new things.

At least they were able to recognize their mistake and course correct.

cindyllm 17 hours ago|||
[dead]
BoredPositron 17 hours ago||
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.
thorum 17 hours ago||
Good day for Kling.
_doctor_love 19 hours ago||
This move makes a lot of sense to me. It never felt like OpenAI was seriously going to try to launch a video-based social network. It was more of a fun way to demonstrate the power of the video generation models, and also to gauge the market and assess: if you put the power to generate videos in the hands of the people, what kinds of videos will they generate?

So OpenAI has done the right thing as a startup here, gotten lots of training data, and observed lots of user behavior that they can now apply going forward.

The Sora models, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere, and I believe OpenAI will continue to invest in them. They’re getting better and better, just like Google’s Veo, which is quite good at generating videos as well.

Using Codex and agent skills, it’s actually quite easy to generate a storyboard and then have a list of shots in that storyboard. Then generate videos from those storyboard stills, and then finally assemble those individual video files into a final movie file using something like ffmpeg. It's also very easy to create a voiceover with TTS and even simple music using ChatGPT Containers (aka the python tool).

This will 'democratize' (ha ha, for people with money obvi) a lot of video creation going forward. Against all wisdom, I am actually quite bullish on this technology, especially in the hands of young people. They are very creative and have lots of stories to share.

Necessary disclaimer as usual around the ethics of how these models were created: all the AI companies have totally ripped off artists in service of creating these models. I wish something would be done about that but I'm not holding my breath. No politician seems to want to touch it.

msabalau 19 hours ago||
Yeah, their forth place video model does not go away, but they didn't ink a billion dollar with Disney that's just gone up in flames because they "weren't serious"

This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.

_doctor_love 19 hours ago||
> it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.

Agree, and didn't intend to imply that. This is just a good startup move that gets a big headline because it's OpenAI. Other startups around the world do the same thing all the time.

ronsor 19 hours ago|||
I'm bullish on video generation technology, but honestly not on OpenAI or any Western company's deployment of it. I think they'll all mostly suffer from the same problems that Sora did.
_doctor_love 19 hours ago||
Yes, sadly, the West is not the leader. The work done by the Chinese labs is just so damn good.
lossyalgo 17 hours ago||
Is OpenAI still considered a startup? They were founded ~10 years ago in December 2015.
cdrnsf 18 hours ago||
I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with or without Disney's blessing.
dawnerd 18 hours ago|
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.
AkelaA 16 hours ago||
AI art as a whole has just become the new clipart. The fact that it’s effortless to produce just means that it has no real artistic value, and by using it all you’re signifying to people is that you’re too cheap to pay someone to create real art.

It’s quickly become the modern day equivalent of Comic Sans, WordArt, and the default clipart illustrations included in Word ‘98.

k3k3 15 hours ago||
I dunno about you... but it boggles my mind how many others can't see it.

Perhaps most people are absolutely devoid of any taste of what makes art? I dont know.

vortegne 8 hours ago||
Techbros, largely, never had any taste to begin with. They just also don't have the skills/will to make any art, so they could hide their lack of taste for a long time.

That said, there are still people with exceptional aesthetic sensibilities in the tech field, obviously. They're just largely not in this space.

paxys 17 hours ago||
For years now people have been saying Anthropic is falling behind because they don't have an image or video generation model. Turns out it was the right decision all along.
r0ckarong 9 hours ago||
Couldn't make it work at taking actual directions huh?
bibimsz 17 hours ago|
hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
More comments...