Goodbye to Sora - Hacker News

Posted by mikeocool 14 hours ago

https://xcancel.com/soraofficialapp/status/20365327959847158...

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

696 points | 501 commentspage 7

152334H 8 hours ago|

the invisible hand of the market strangles its strongest adherents

The desire for something "new", for a Mildly Ethical product, killed off the most obvious path to success - to actually just make TikTok+AIGC, or in the present, Douyin+Seedance2.

reassess_blind 7 hours ago||

Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?

mrdependable 11 hours ago||

My guess is that we are going to see a new uber expensive video generation tool from them aimed at filmmakers in the next year.

PLenz 12 hours ago||

This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.

yabutlivnWoods 11 hours ago|

No. Money is moat. Not enough of it is what keeps the average person on the treadmill rather than drawing their own cartoons.

Hustle just to barely stay afloat water or drown, means no time to compete with our own output.

America is a financially engineered joke regurgitating its own recent history, collapsing like an LLM trained on its own output. The rich are not even pretending it's "a free country" as they have enough wealth for how many years left most of them have to live, and have seen the apathy to their own plight keeping the average person in theit lane they don't fear the public.

It’ll all collapse as they generationally churn out of life and the Millennials on down with zero skills but "data entry into a computer" will be holding an empty bag, taking orders from foreign nations that bought up all the American businesses we built.

xnx 12 hours ago||

Generated video is useful and valuable, but Sora was not a frontier model.

Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.

4k0hz 12 hours ago|

Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases except maybe stock video generation.

npn 8 hours ago||

turn out the schizos were right. most of OpenAI *real* investment money comes from Gulf countries. without that money flow they can't sustain the cash burn anymore.

janilowski 3 hours ago||

From the linked Hollywood reporter article:

"...the AI company exits the video generation business."

"OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, is not getting out of the AI video business [...], of course... "

I hate journalism.

noemit 14 hours ago||

I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)

poemxo 13 hours ago||

gpt-image-1.5 works decently for generating images compared to old Sora, but you pay per generation. It's possible that monthly flat rates were too much of a loss leader for OpenAI. I imagine the server side cost for generating video for Sora 2 is much higher as well.

vunderba 12 hours ago|

You also have access to gpt-image-1.5 in the regular ChatGPT interface if you pay for a flat subscription - though I don't know how many images it limits you to per month.

atleastoptimal 11 hours ago|

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.

davebranton 11 hours ago|

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.

supern0va 11 hours ago|||

>Will the machine dream?

You seem to be mixing up intelligence and consciousness. Not only does intelligence exist outside of humans, and even mammals, but it exists outside of brains and even neurons. For example, slime molds have fascinating problem solving abilities: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811

It is clear that whatever we are...creating/growing with LLMs, it is very unlike human intelligence, but it is nonetheless some type of intelligence.

atleastoptimal 11 hours ago|||

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.

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